Product Description

This is a collection of tips and tools for getting the most out of Amazon.com, whether you're an avid Amazon shopper, Amazon Associate developing your online storefront and honing your recommendations for better linking and more referral fees, seller listing your own products for sale on Amazon.com, or a programmer building your own application on the foundation provided by the Amazon Web Services API. Shoppers will learn how to make the most of Amazon.com's deep functionality and become part of the Amazon community, maintain wishlists, tune recommendations, "share the love" with friends and family, etc. Amazon Associates will find tips for how best to list their titles, how to promote their offerings by fine tuning search criteria and related titles information, and even how to make their store fronts more attractive. And the real power users will use the Amazon API to build Amazon-enabled applications, create store fronts and populate them with items to be picked, packed and shipped by Amazon. And just about anyone can become a seller on Amazon.com, listing items, deciding on pricing, and fulfilling orders for products new and used.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #633571 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 280 pages

Review
"The ultimate guide for searching for, and selling goods on Amazon." PC Plus, April

About the Author
Paul Bausch is an accomplished web application developer, and is the co-creator of the popular weblog software Blogger. Among his recent applications is BookWatch, a site that scans weblogs for book mentions, analyzes them to find the most frequently mentioned books, and uses the Amazon API to display the results. Paul is also an accomplished writer, and is the co-author of We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs, published by Wiley.

Excerpted from Amazon Hacks by Paul Bausch. Copyright © 2003. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Hack #14 Fine-Tune Your Recommendations

As Amazon gets to know your tastes, it makes recommendations about products you might like. A few quick steps can ensure that your recommendations are on target

One of the features that makes browsing at Amazon unique is their exceptional ability to personalize the experience. Amazon analyzes your purchase history and makes recommendations of other products you might like based on your unique tastes. You can begin browsing your personal recommendations in Amazon's Your Store section. You can find it by clicking the tab that says "Your Name store" from the main menu.

Reactions to recommended products are inevitably polarized, ranging from "that's perfect!" to "that's waaaay off!" The key to getting good recommendations is Amazon having data about what you like, and even if you've never purchased anything there, you can give Amazon plenty of data about your interests.

To reach the fine-tuning features, go to Your Store and choose "Improve Your Recommendations" from the list of links on the lefthand side of the page. This will lead to the appropriately titled Improve Your Recommendations page, shown in . The following features can be accessed from this page.

Recommendations Wizard
If you're creating an account for the first time, the first thing you'll see is a link that leads to Amazon's Recommendations Wizard. This is a getting-to-know-you process that asks about your favorite subject areas or categories and some keywords for various departments, and lists some specific products for you to rate. If you're a long-time customer, running through the wizard is a good way to start refining your recommendations. On the Improve Your Recommendations page the wizard is called "Select Your Favorite Areas." Just click Continue under that heading to get started.

Rate Items in Your Amazon History
Your Amazon History is a virtual collection of products associated with your account. It includes products you've purchased, of course, but also items you've rated, items in your wish list, or items you've told Amazon something about in some way. Each item in your Amazon history can have information associated with it that you set:

The fact that you own it

A 1-5 star rating

Whether or not the item should be used to make recommendations

Or simply, "Not Interested"

Amazon uses all of this information to make your recommendations more accurate. You can start adding this type of data by clicking any of the links under "Edit your Amazon history" (see ).

Figure 2. Editing personal Amazon history
You can rate an item by clicking the number of stars you'd like to give it. You can also specify whether or not to use the item for recommendations. This is particularly handy to weed out any gift purchases you may have made. Buying children's books for your cousin can throw a wrench into your personal recommendations. This is a way to set the record straight.

TIP
Some browsers don't support the 1-5 star interface. Instead, ratings are set with radio buttons. Be sure to click the "Save & Continue" button at the bottom of the page to save your ratings if you don't see the clickable star system.

Add and Rate Items That You Didn't Purchase at Amazon
It's a little-known fact that people actually buy items from stores other than Amazon. If you'd like to use Amazon's recommendation service with these items thrown into the mix, you still can. This is especially helpful when Amazon continually recommends a product that you already own.

From the Improve Your Recommendations page, you can enter a keyword into the form under "Rate items you own," and you'll see a list of search results related to that keyword. Each item has the standard rating options and the ability to mark it as one you own. You can also rate and mark an item as yours from its product detail page. On the lefthand side of the page, you'll find a Rate This Item box ().

Customer Reviews

Very good for web developers
If you're interested in adding Amazon Affiliate schemes to your website, working with the API, or just finding what you want more easily, this book is excellent. It starts with the basics - how Amazon's file structure and ASIN numbers work - and moves through more complex Affiliate schemes to finish off with details of how to use the API to write your own applications.

Some parts are exclusive to Amazon.com - but hopefully Amazon.co.uk will add these features soon. Others are slightly out of date, but that's to be expected - I found no glaring inaccuracies. Using info in this book, I went from an amateur Affiliate to writing a program using the API for my website. Yes, a lot of this info is available on the web, but this book collects it all together, and can be read in the bath...

Excellent guide to Amazon
This book covers a wide range of tips and tricks for using Amazon. These include at the beginning a range of advice for people who want to know more about shopping on Amazon and using the Friends and Family area and Wish Lists, but you will get a lot more out of it if you have an Amazon Associate account and Developer token with web hosting which supports the use of PHP, as many of the scripts provided only work if you're able to upload them and use them online.

I am a little puzzled that nowhere in the book is it stated that you should not direct link to Amazon's images - all the hacks around the use of images involve direct links even though it states clearly in the Associate terms of service that you should upload images to your own server rather than linking directly to images on Amazon.

Many of the tips are also aimed at amazon.com rather than amazon.co.uk but most will work on all the Amazon sites.

It's a great book and well worth keeping to hand even if you're just browsing around adding to your shopping cart and/or Wish List!