My Amazon RSS Wish List

Some great Amazon features aren't available through their Web Services interface (AWS) yet. Because the Amazon RSS feeds rely on AWS data, you can only create feeds of available info. Granted, the data includes all of their millions of products across thousands of categories, but there's still some great info waiting to be exposed. Anil mentioned that he wanted his gold box as RSS. And here's my Wish List for additions to AWS that would make good feeds: In Amazon Hacks, I show how you can access some of this data programmatically with screen scraping. It would be much more stable through AWS, though.

When you think about AWS data as RSS, it puts a new spin on how the info can be used, and what features should be available as XML. What RSS feeds would you like to see?
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Hey Paul,

There actually is a really old and probably unsupported way to get purchase circle data from Amazon. Check this out:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/cm/community-data/-/221933/book/B/

It returns a plain-text file of purchase circle data... and you can get any type of list you want by changing the three parameters at the end. The first parameter is the community id, the second is the product group, and the third is U or B (Unique Sellers or Best Sellers). If you browse Amazon's site, you can see that these are the same three parameters that the regular purchase circle template takes:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/cm/browse-communities/-/221933/book/B/

I used this a long time to build a purchase circles page for Seattle Stories:

http://seattlestories.net/more/purchase-circles.cgi?community_id=223712&type=music&style=U&query=

Really obscure, and I doubt anyone uses this, but just thought I'd mention it. At the time this was launched, there was a help page on Amazon about it, but I am not able to find it at the moment.
by Erik Benson on Aug 1st, 2003 at 2:25 pm
Here's something I've been wanting -- a way to produce a wishlist purchase link that when someone clicks on it, it adds the item to their cart, but to be purchased for and delivered to the wishlist owner.

Ie: I'd like to have a way to list my wishlist on my web site so that people could click on the items to buy them for me. Or even provide the wishlist to in the form of an RSS feed. Possible?
by Brad Choate on Aug 1st, 2003 at 3:21 pm
Thanks for the tip, Erik, I haven't seen that before. I wish I would have known about it sooner. I wrote a quick little Perl script to grab that data and turn it into an RSS feed:

http://onfocus.com/circle_rss.pl.txt

You just need to find the purchase circle you want to syndicate, note the (approx.) 4 digit number in the URL, and run this script on the command line:

circle_rss.pl [circle ID]

You could even set this up as a nightly cron job to create an RSS feed on a server somewhere. Then you could add the URL of the produced file to your newsreader and you'd be up-to-date with that circle.

Brad, you can definitely get your Wish List as RSS. You just need to do a standard public AWS "WishListSearch" query with your Wish List ID, and then change the f= value to the Amazon RSS stylesheet. Email me if you want the details. I have no idea how you'd go about adding something to someone else's cart that is then sent to you...seems like there could be some security issues with that. (You can add items you're selling through Amazon Marketplace to someone's cart, though.)
by pb on Aug 1st, 2003 at 4:21 pm
Yeah, that would've made a good hack. I had completely forgotten about it until just now otherwise I definitely would've passed it on to you earlier. Sorry about that.
by Erik Benson on Aug 3rd, 2003 at 9:30 pm


Oh, no problem at all! I appreciate the mention...it's a great undocumented feature! Just wish I could have squeezed it into Amazon Hacks. ;)
by pb on Aug 4th, 2003 at 11:54 am
Hi! You're reading a single post on a weblog by Paul Bausch where I share recommended links, my photos, and occasional thoughts.
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