Amazon's

Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

 Product Advertising API, formerly Amazon Associates Web Service (A2S) and before that known as Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS), is a web service

Web service

A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...

 and application programming interface

Application programming interface

An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...

 (API) that gives application programmers access to Amazon's product catalog data. Accessible via either the SOAP

SOAP

SOAP, originally defined as Simple Object Access Protocol, is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services in computer networks...

 or REST

Representational State Transfer

Representational state transfer is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. The term representational state transfer was introduced and defined in 2000 by Roy Fielding in his doctoral dissertation...

 protocols it enables products to be listed and/or sold though third-party websites and applications.
It is part of the Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services is a collection of remote computing services that together make up a cloud computing platform, offered over the Internet by Amazon.com...

 (AWS).

Functionality

Amazon.com developed the Product Advertising API toward three classifications of users:

• Associates: third-party site owners wishing to build more effective sponsored affiliate
  Affiliate marketing
  Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts...
  
   links to Amazon products, thus increasing their referral fees
• Vendors: sellers on the Amazon
  Amazon.com
  Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
  
   platform looking to manage inventory and receive batch product data feeds
• Developers: third-party developers building Amazon
  Amazon.com
  Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
  
  -driven functionality into their applications

The API allows clients to search or browse Amazon.com

Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

's product catalog; to retrieve detailed product information, reviews, and images; and to interface with customer shopping carts. Purchases at Amazon through a third-party website or application allows you to earn up to 15% in referral fees.

Motivation

The motivation behind the free Product Advertising API is to give partners the opportunity to earn money by promoting for Amazon products. The access is given to developers of applications that primarily bring or at least seem to have the potential to bring gains to Amazon.

External links

• Amazon Product Advertising API (official site)