This is something that's been bothering me for awhile and may well affect other Links users. Somewhere around a year ago (very rough estimate), Amazon.com changed something with their direct linking where what formally took you to the product page now takes you to a intermediate page with a brief description and a lot of other related items. You have to then click on the desired item to get to the full page.

Given Amazon's 5/15% commission system, I've had this uneasy feeling that that requisite click through is dropping all direct links down to the 5% level... I haven't been able to find anything mentioning that, though, and the build-a-link tools still build links that point to that intermediate page, so the method at least seems current. At any rate, I've had very few 15% commissions since around the time that change was made...

I just discovered you can format the URLs differently, however. Instead of:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/...

you can do:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/...

and it will go directly to the desired product page. If you have a lot of such links that you want to update, here is a MySQL query that will do the trick:

UPDATE Links SET URL = REPLACE(URL, 'http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN', 'http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-')
WHERE URL LIKE '%http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN%';

Dan

You can just add

/ref=nosim/

after your associate ID, and it will take your users directly to the details page.

Ivan
-----
Iyengar Yoga Resources / GT Plugins

I haven't tested it, but that sounds like another viable option. Probably easier than the one I came up with, since it's less to tack onto the default links.

Anyone know if their various linking formats are documented anywhere?

Dan

Check your account area.

They have a new XML or similar developers area, and last I looked, a lot of information was being set up in there.

Amazon is about the only website that reaslizes they exist because of the other websites, not in spite of them. They have tried through the years to make things as easy as possible -- such as uniform linking URL's, information pages, and such.

They are also the only one of the big players that actively markets their 3rd party accounts (auctions, shops, sellers, etc) right along with their own current prices.


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I looked through my account area a few weeks ago and couldn't find any mention of URL formats. I also sent a message to them and haven't heard back. Other than this issue, I do agree that Amazon is a great company to work with as an affiliate/associate.

There is some talk of them going to a single commission level, which could make the issue a moot point. Still, I can't see any reason why someone would want to be taken to an intermediate page when they are clicking on a direct link for a specific item they're interested in... Whether its deceptive or innocent, it strikes me as highly undesirable, and as far as I can tell, undocmented.

Dan

I think this is the pertinent piece of information:

http://associates.amazon.com/...ating-agreement.html


With that intermediate page resulting from their change of structure, there is an add to cart link which presumably still results in 15% commissions, but I would guess the number of people that add it in that fashion instead of clicking through to the full detailed page is miniscule.

I really don't see how that could be a completely honest "mistake"... Seems like a rather clever marketing ploy to me. It practically defeats the purpose of taking the time to set up a directory of direct links if you'll be dropped down to the 5% level in most cases. Why not just have a general Amazon link and let users search off-site then???

If anyone else has seen a significant drop in referral fees, It would be well worth your time to take a closer look... My only concern with the method I listed in the first post is some references to direct links needing to contain the ASIN. I don't know if that means they have to contain the number or the actual string, "ASIN." We'll see...

On a different topic, has anyone tackled expanding on Links detailed pages through use of the new Amazon Developers Kit? Seems like that could be a nice tool, although I see there are some similar commission level issues with certain linking/cart methods.

Dan

Yes, I use the amazon api here
http://slashdemocracy.org/...i?d=1&query=soap

John

I am building a plugin for my site that fetches Amazon information and stores it. You basically just add a field "amazon_asin" to your table, and the script fetches all the information for that ASIN and stores it in a separate table. This information is then available on the link.html template and on the detailed.html template.

Works great!

But: in their terms of service amazon says that you have to have your data up to date, that means that you have to fetch the information at least once every 24 hours. If you are going to display price information, you have to fetch the prices once every hour. So there goes your dream of storing a whole bookshop locally and updating it every other week....

Ivan
-----
Iyengar Yoga Resources / GT Plugins

John,

Thanks for sharing. If I understand your layout correctly, you've got your Links categories on the left and dynamic Amazon content in a frame on the right? (I didn't see the right frame when I first looked, so I was a bit confused.)

Ivan, sounds like the Amazon Developers Kit/API might save you *quite a few* hours of work and CPU processing units. :)

I've been playing around with a few of the XML/PHP code bases that are available for the Amazon API (still not sure I'm using the right terminology for some of these things) this afternoon with mixed success.

The first one I tried worked for a bit, but was rather cumbersome, then went belly up and even the original code wouldn't work...

I switched over to the code at:

http://associatesshop.filzhut.net/...s/example2_index.php

and have had much better luck (I much prefer his example 1; you can manually change the URL to example1_index.php), even getting it to somewhat resemble the actual Amazon look:

http://run-down.com/....php?ASIN=0790739291

I could see that feeding quite nicely into a dynamic detailed page.

Dan

What I've done, or tried to do, is develop a bookstore which has the images, content, and descriptions, some from amazon, some my own, but then pull the pricing/etc information from amazon, when the user goes to buy or get more details.

It's a hybrid system, but with the new amazon api functions, it probably is more doable now, than before.


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Please leave a PM here.

I just had a thought this evening for how things could be integrated
without much extra work. Instead of going through and adding/populating
an ASIN field for a large number of Amazon links in the database, I
decided to use a regex to do the dirty work. A little slower, but I'm only
doing it on detailed pages, so a single regex shouldn't be of
much impact.

In PHP speak:


Dan

Oops, that should be ([0-9A-Za-z]+) instead of ([0-9]+) in the regex above. I forgot some ASIN's have letters in them... Are there any other characters that might show up?

Dan