Amazon - Product Advertising API

A few things to keep in mind while using Amazon Services for a typical data synchronization case are as follow:

1. You must know the exact nature of services offered by Amazon. Also know about the seller central api’s for add/edit/delete inventory on amazon as well as idea of which service to use for downward synchronization.
   
   
2. You must have an idea of what does it mean by
   Amazon Fulfillment API,
   Amazon Product Advertising API,
   Amazon e-Commerce Services,
   Amazon Associates Web Service
   and never get confused with several services offered by amazon including its cloud computing and storage services.
   
   
3. My typical seller's listing solution was Found in Product Advertising API and started experimenting its BrowseNodes first which got successful and I got a number of nodes with default seller: Amazon.
   
   
4. easiest way to find out sellerid is to access the path: http://www.amazon.com/seller/[YourShopName] as soon as you hit this, amazon will take you to a page with shop’s info: look for the url now. url will have a sellerid for sure provided by amazon in the url to access right shop.
   
   
5. Be aware of locale: you must be very sure which international amazon website hold the products of your shop. If you are accessing amazon.com for your uk based shop, you are on way to endless fatigue.
   
   
6. knowing the correct API procedure to call. Know what exactly you require and what are the meaning for several required & optional parameters of API Request calls. Start with only minimal required parameters and build correct signatures to be sent with the request.
   
   
7. Must know the ResponseGroups and Search Indices. Correct RG will ease your life in getting exact data from amazon.
   
   
8. Know the error messages returned by amazon and try solutions to them. Normally they can be logical and require a little attention towards right combination of request parameters. Again knowing the exact nature & combination of request parameters of any call is must.
   
   
9. Last but not least: Know your response XML. You must understand the XML structure for sure. If you can get a parser for xml returned by amazon, well & good. Otherwise you must be very good at logic and parse the xml on you own writing some class for it.

A good solution must post proper-correct request parameter and will be handling the response to transform it correctly to your desired form i.e. database, csv etc. Hourly, Daily or Weekly synchronization must be accomplished with appropriate request parameters to get updated/latest data only thus improving the communication time.

Types of Mobile Website: Mobile Web Applications with PHP & .Net

There are two types of Mobile Websites:

1. Built for Symbian and other Mobiles OS (Nokia/Sony Ericson/Motorolla or any other) they are not rich in Graphics and they mostly have textual information with few images. Please see examples at this website for these mobile websites which run in any mobile: http://winksite.com. Please click on any icon in the bottom to see website in nokia simulator. We are developing this version of mobile website for one of our client .

2. Second type of mobile website is built for IPhones. Please visit http://mobify.me/gallery/wd/ for few examples. They are XHTML Based websites

?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "
//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.2 //EN"
"http://www.openmobilealliance.org/tech/DTD/xhtml-mobile12.dtd"

which have rich graphics which are normally visible to only IPhones and their graphics are not visible in normal mobiles.

Although you can create the dynamic html on your own but a better experience would be to use some library that generates code for you with PHP or .Net. An Available Good Library For Generating Code is HAWHAW:

This library can be used with php or .net and it create wap code

http://Hawhaw.de

with the help of this library, We were able to create wap output of our choice which otherwise seems to have no help on html effects for wap and many other html attributes. Now you just have to create one object of page, form or any html element and nest/place them accordingly. This library not only generate code for symbian browsers but also create XHTML output for IPhones.

Emulators

When we talk about working with such limited functionality websites, we certainly needs simulators as well which output like real mobile. You can use Microsoft Mobile Explorer 3.0 Emulator for this purpose.

If you working for IPhone's rich graphics web application, I would advise you to use this simulator: MobiOne (http://www.genuitec.com/mobile/download.html). This is IPhone and Palm Pre emulator and has just updated to the Milestone 6 version, which includes a new drag-n-drop mobile Web visual designer for mockups, updated OSS components, screen capture, multi-touch and gesture support and improved PhoneGap support for hybrid applications!

I hope all this information will help you getting quick start your mobile application today. Feel free to ask me any question regarding Mobile web applications and custom IPhone Application Development. I could be reached at Analyst.Net@gmail.com