WeSeePeople

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Amazon's New RSS Gig, Product Promotions via API and RSS

The information and the feeds Seems to be working and pretty interesting. They are using Amazon S3 to store the feeds! or the feeds are from S3.

I have enabled the fist feed on meddesktop blog, look at the first right hand column.

The newest release of ECS provides both an API and a set of RSS feeds to allow developers direct access to promotions.

What are promotions? Glad you asked!

Promotions are short-term special deals that help customers to make purchases sooner rather than later, and which allow merchants to provide more attractive offers in a competitive retail environment. A promotion for a particular ASIN could be anyone one of the following:

  • Buy 3 items and get a 4th one for free.
  • Get 10% off of a purchase.
  • Save $20 on a purchase of $100 or more.
  • Free shipping.

At Amazon we have found that promotions are a key tool for driving additional sales and for increasing the ever-important conversion ratio (shoppers vs. buyers).

Finally, there are a set of 3 RSS feeds, updated each day, which enumerate the current set of active promotions:

If you look closely at those URLs, you will see that they are stored, appropriately enough, in Amazon S3.

No comments: