Amazon

Imagine that you're encouraged to leave notes on any book, CD, or DVD letting others know how you feel about it—good or bad. Imagine being able to peer into other people's shopping bags when they have items similar to yours. Or imagine looking at...

Amazon's direct community features include: Reviews Reviews are the most direct way to let others know how you feel about any item in Amazon's catalog—in your own words. The review includes a 1-5 star rating that summarizes your opinion at a...

As more and more sites integrate closely with Amazon, though, there is more demand to tap into the community via code. 3.3.1 Accessing Through Web Services The Web Services API (see Chapter 6) offers some access. When accessing an individu...

Anyone with a customer account at Amazon.com can post a public review of products sold on the web site. You can post under your own name, under a handle (nickname), or anonymously as just "a reader from Poughkeepsie." You can get started revie...

A positive or negative review rating can have a big impact on an item's sales. Naturally some people are very interested in this information: publishers, authors, other merchants, or fans of a particular book, DVD, or CD. Each item's product de...

If you'd like to integrate Amazon's review system into an existing site, you can do so with some simple HTML. By studying the HTML Amazon uses to submit reviews, you can create a generic form that sends reviews to Amazon from any site. 29.1 T...

It allows anyone with a web site to generate dynamic customer reviews without needing to know anything about Amazon's API (see Chapter 6). An independent developer has provided this service to anyone who would like to use it. All you need to se...

Reviews give feedback to publishers, authors, and manufacturers, help customers make buying decisions, and help other retailers decide what to stock. If you want to monitor all the reviews for a product or set of products, visiting each product d...

Each review includes a 1-5 star rating, and the average review reflects the group opinion of a book. 32.1 Sorting Search Results You can sort any search results by choosing Avg. Customer Review from the "Sort by:" drop-down menu on any resu...

If you've also looked at the star rating for some of your favorite products, then you know that the rating can be a good indication of quality. Both the Amazon recommendation and the customer rating add important information to a product, and can...

Here's an even more powerful way to integrate Amazon reviews with your web site. Unlike linking to reviews [Hack #28] or monitoring reviews for changes [Hack #31], this puts the entire text of Amazon reviews on your web site. The easiest and m...

With your Amazon ID [Hack #43] in hand, you can link directly to a page on Amazon that lists all of your reviews: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/cm/member-reviews/-/insert Amazon ID If you want to take it a step further, you can use som...

Amazon's "Share The Love" feature lets you send a 10% discount to people for the products you've purchased. For example, as you're checking out while purchasing The Matrix DVD, you're given the option to send a Share the Love discount via email. ...

com that were written by other Amazon visitors. Anyone can write a guide about any topic. To get a sense of how guides work, start looking for them on Amazon pages. Amazon links to guides toward the bottom of product detail pages with the headi...

You can add a guide-writing form to your own web site, customize it, and even offer it to your visitors as a convenience. 38.1 The Code This is just standard HTML, so create a file called remote_guide.html with the following form: <...

You can usually find the form on the product detail page under the heading "What's Your Advice?". If it's not there, you can always find the form on the product's advice page: http://amazon.com/o/tg/detail/-/insert ASIN/?vi=advice The form sh...

The first step to this hack is knowing where to find all of the customer advice on one page. The following URL links directly to the advice page for a given ASIN: http://amazon.com/o/tg/detail/-/insert ASIN/?vi=advice 40.1 The Code This ...

The way you organize things is often unique to your experience, occupation, personality, and a host of other factors. Amazon's Listmania! feature embraces these unique ways of framing the world by allowing you to organize any of their products ho...

But if your friends have Amazon accounts, Amazon gives you a chance to make it happen. Adding friends to your Amazon Friends list allows you to see products they've added to their Wish Lists, read their latest product reviews, and potentially see...

The URLs of the community features revolve around these IDs, and to link directly to certain features (and to use some of the hacks in this book!) you'll need to know your own Amazon ID. Your Amazon ID can be found in almost every community feat...

Amazon's purchase circles are specialized bestseller lists broken down by geography or organization. If you visit the Friends & Favorites page, choose "Purchase Circles" from the drop-down list, and type the name of your city, chances are you...

Amazon doesn't offer the ability to look up purchase circles by U.S. zip code, but using the USPS web site and some simple pattern matching, you can find purchase circles for all cities within a given zip code. 45.1 The Code This PHP scrip...

Sales rank is a look at how a particular item is selling in relation to every other item. An item with a sales rank of 1 is the best-selling item at Amazon right now. The lower the number, the better the sales. One problem with the sales rank n...

Unlike spoken conversation, conversations on the Web have a physical presence, a shape that persists over time in the form of digital text, and a visible trail left behind by people participating in the conversation. Trying to figure out what thes...

We mention books we're reading at parties, during interviews, at the dinner table, so it's no surprise that we're also mentioning them in our web sites. Unfortunately, until recently, this required messing around with HTML to get the book's title...