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I know this is gonna sound crazy, but it is a client request.

They are wanting to know if there is an add-on available or that has been developed that will automatically search Amazon with whatever the entry title is; which is a specific product, and have it then create a specific affiliate like link within another custom field.

Client is not wanting to have to input any information themselves to search Amazon or produce this link but have EE and the Amazon API do it automatically.

Example of link is: http://www.amazon.com/dp/ASIN/?tag=YourAssociatesId

I know of this add-on: http://www.hopstudios.com/software/amazon_web_services_aws_products But this requires the client to input info to search amazon, not do it automatically dependent of what they filled out for the entry title.

Has there been add-on developed for a specific site that possibly is available?

Thanks

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  • 2
    Consider updating your title to be more relevant to your question's content :)
    – Natetronn
    Dec 5, 2012 at 4:17

3 Answers 3

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As UltraBob has mentioned before the HopStudios plugin will not be able to achieve what you are wanting unless the client is entering very specific titles for their entries and all of the items they are wanting to add are in the same category on Amazon. By default the keyword search use the "books" index for Amazon. You could bypass this at the template level but not based upon the title alone if you need to search multiple indexes.

The keywords search tag can often produce some wild results even with descriptive words. For example when I used it I was creating an online Vinyl record store where it would pull the product data from Amazon instead of the admins having to enter the data into the CP. Using the keywords search for something like "The Beatles" I would get plenty of results that were not the Beatles but someone that had covered a Beatles song. I eventually had to switch over to using the ASIN number to get reliable results.

So unless your client is using the ASIN number as the title of their entries you would need to have a custom field or develop a fieldtype to handle what you want to do.

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  • Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but don't you mean "UNLESS your client is using the ASIN number" in that last paragraph?
    – UltraBob
    Dec 6, 2012 at 3:15
  • Late night typing :-/ You are correct I will modify my entry Dec 6, 2012 at 3:26
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Would you not just be able to insert the {title} field between the {define_keywords} tag pair in the template, does parse order get in your way there, or am I missing some other reason why that wouldn't work?

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  • That should work as I have used it in the past with custom fields without problems. The only problem I can see would be that the results returned might not be the product they want to showcase. Dec 5, 2012 at 4:17
  • its a specific product, so it may need to search another field due to title matching other items
    – Tad Ward
    Dec 5, 2012 at 4:19
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    In that case I would think they would need to specify something like the ASIN somewhere. I don't think any add-on would be able to magically figure out exactly which product they meant from its title.
    – UltraBob
    Dec 5, 2012 at 4:21
  • UltraBob, exactly. But again they aren't wanting to input any info into the the site.
    – Tad Ward
    Dec 5, 2012 at 4:24
  • Could it be that they want the products directly in the CP similar to say how one of the video modules work where it pulls in products via keywords allowing them to then choose the product? And of course at the template level everything is handled for them "magically." No need to go to Amazon and find the product and it's ASIN number in other words. I don't know if there is an add-on which does this and I'd be making an assumption about the API if I said it could be done or not though, I imagine it's possible.
    – Natetronn
    Dec 5, 2012 at 4:55
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I think theoretically this can work. If you use the exact ASIN for each product as a segment variable and then use that segment variable as the search term within the AWS add-on from HopStudios you could build the page entirely from data from the Amazon api.

The only potential problem would be parse order - you would need to test the setup to see if worked.

Example:

{exp:aws_products:search limit="1" region="com" index="All" debug="no" cache="yes" refresh="300000"}
{define_keywords}{segment_3}{/define_keywords}

{if product_name}Product Name: {product_name}<br />{/if}

{/exp:aws_products:search}

Note that I've used index="All" which neatly gets around just searching the Books section of Amazon. It's not documented on HopStudios site but I just took a wild guess and it worked. : )

Also if you use the ASIN as the search term it will work on all of Amazon's international sites (provided the product is listed). So again theoretically if you were to specify the Amazon locale as a segment variable you could create localised versions of the page.

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  • The issue at hand would be that the original client in question wanted to enter a normal title instead of having to grab the ASIN number from Amazon. If you specify an ASIN number it will override other settings (kinda of like adding an entry_id to the channel entries loop) Mar 15, 2013 at 15:52
  • I think the problem here is not the technology but the client's expectations. It's simply not possible to find one specific item using natural language queries in a database the size of Amazon's where each product can have multiple variants.
    – Frequency
    Mar 15, 2013 at 16:45

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