In Part 1, I showed how to construct a URL which would pull out data from Amazon's web services on the best selling Power Ranger toys. With that part done, it's now time to think about how we make use of that data by using it in a web page.

For this example, I am going to show you how I do this using VB in ASP.net. I realise that ASP.net is a bit of a minority interest and it seems like most people out there are using PHP. I will add tutorials for other options later on, but today I will just do ASP.net and for that you will need web hosting space which supports the .net framework.

Overview

ASP.net comes with some nice controls which you can easily bind to an XML data source. The only challenge here is that to use them in their simplest form, they like the XML source to be rather flat in structure. Unfortunately the XML from Amazon is quite complex and has many layers to it which makes it trickier than I like to bind to a data control. So the way I do it is in two steps:

1) Apply an XSLT transformation to the XML source to "flatten it" and just give me the data I want.
2) Bind the transformed XML to my data control.

There will surely be other ways to achieve the same goal, but this is the way I to do it to achieve the result I want with the skillset I have.

Use XSLT to Transform and Flatten the XML from Amazon

Amazon's Web Services have an XSLT processor which means you are able to apply an set of XSL rules to the XML it generates. I have written the following XSL tranformation which extracts key information from the AWS Large Response I mentioned in the previous post and outputs it as more simplified, flatter XML.

See XSL Transformation file (save with .xslt extension to use)

If you want to try following this example, you can save that text file as something like transform.xslt and upload it to your own webspace. I will also zip it up with and make it available for download with the web page source code which I will come to shortly.

Once it has been uploaded to some webspace that you have accessible to you, you then add a Style parameter to the querystring that we built in Part 1.

http://xml-uk.amznxslt.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService&
Operation=ItemSearch&AWSAccessKeyId=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX&
AssociateTag=toysandvideogames-21&&SearchIndex=Toys&
Title=Power%20Rangers&Sort=salesrank&ResponseGroup=Large&Style=http://mydomainname/transform.xslt

Bind the Data to a Web Page Control

Now that the source XML is a simplified form, it's very easy to bind to a data control in a webpage in asp.net. I won't explain too much but just give you the source code. It's really hard to paste code into Blogger without it kicking up a fuss so here's a link to the source code in a text file.

ASP.net Example Source Code

Replace the XXXXX in the code with the URL from Part 1 and then save that with a .aspx extension, upload it and then access it in the browser and it should look something like this.



There we have it - live product information from Amazon with the best selling Power Rangers toys. That's one way you can do it in asp.net using VB - I'm sure there are even better ways. I'll soon post up instruction on achieving the same using different development environments.

Use at your own risk - remember your web server needs to support asp.net

Any questions?

Labels: amazon, asp.net, aws, REST, web services, xml

I recently promoted on one of my sites a toy that had been reduced heavily by one of the merchants I promote, coming down from £300 to £250. Accordingly, I recommended it to my users with the usual hyperbole - "amazing offer... fantastic discount" etc.

Whilst in my online travels, I found the website of a small chain with branches around the South, who don't have an affiliate scheme, selling the same item for £199.

This raised a question: is there any point telling my users about good offers at shops - online and offline - where I won't receive any commissions for sales generated. Am I providing a genuine service to my users, or is it the guise of a service purely to take advantage of performance marketing.

As it happens, the merchant in this case soon sold out of the item so there was no point in me flagging it up to my visitors. Personally, I think the answer depends on the context of the site. If it's just some purely affiliate, flash in the pan site which may serve an immediate purpose but doesn't have much longevity, it's probably not worth it. If you have a loyal user base, a brand you care about or an email list of subscribers, I think telling them about relevant discounts and offers for which you don't actually receive any commission serves a purpose, will strengthen user loyalty and increase your own credibility.

Amazon's Web Services expose all their product information to developers using a couple of different methods: SOAP and REST. In this guide, I will look at how you can use REST, or XML over HTTP, to retrieve information. XML over HTTP is a URL-centric approach so the key to querying the Amazon data store is to construct a querying URL that has the right parameters to pull out the information you want. In this example, I am going to extract a list of bestselling Power Ranger toys from Amazon UK.

We start our URL with

http://

The first thing you need to do is then identify the right resource to connect to, which will depend on the regionality of the results you want. To extract information from Amazon UK web services, use:

xml-uk.amznxslt.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService

The next step is to define the mode of operation. For instance, are you searching for a set of results or looking up a specific item. For this example, we are searching for a set of results, so add in:

&Operation=ItemSearch

It's at this point that I add in the developer's key which you get when you sign up to Amazon Web Services.

&AWSAccessKeyId=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (replace the Xs with your own)

You also need to add a parameter with the Amazon associate ID you want to use, so that the results have it embedded in them, creating the trackable deeplinks which will earn you money.

&AssociateTag=toysandvideogames-21

Next step is to define the "SearchIndex" in which you want to search. Examples include DVDs, VideoGames, Kitchen or Blended to search across indices. In this example, I will use toys:

&SearchIndex=Toys

The next important parameter is to define the search text which will bring back the appropriate results. The parameter is the "Title":

&Title=Power%20Rangers (notice that spaces are replaced with "%20" so the URL is not broken)

I'm next going to define the order of the results. Like when you are on the Amazon site itself, you can see the results in all manner of ways such as alphabetically sorted, in price order or see the bestselling first. I think being able to get the data in order of sales rank is such a useful thing compared to the functionality of static product feed files provided by most affiliate networks. Here's how you do that:

&Sort=salesrank

There's one more parameter we need to add in which defines the amount of information that Amazon sends back in response to your query. There's quite a few differing options, but for this example and for simplicity, I will just use this parameter, which asks for a "Large" response.

&ResponseGroup=Large

Ok, now if you concatenate all the bold snippets above into one long URL, you will have your completed querystring for pulling out information on the bestselling Power Rangers toys at Amazon, and it should look something like this:

http://xml-uk.amznxslt.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService&
Operation=ItemSearch&AWSAccessKeyId=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX&
AssociateTag=toysandvideogames-21&SearchIndex=Toys&
Title=Power%20Rangers&Sort=salesrank&ResponseGroup=Large

The beauty of this is that you can test it instantly -just copy and paste what's above into the address bar of your internet browser and press enter and you will see XML data returned from Amazon with all the information on best selling Power Rangers toys (don't forget to watch out for line breaks when copying, and replacing the XXXs with your developer key from AWS).

Now that you have got the product data from Amazon in XML format, the next stage is to format it and display it on a web page so you can actually use it. There's a range ways to do that and I'll write about them in Part 2.

Labels: amazon, aws, REST, web services, xml

I rather publicly slated Affiliate Window the other day for the timing of their "Christmas presents" promotion. I did also praise them by saying "It's a really nice idea to give Christmas presents to affiliates" but questioned the thinking behind the timing, based on what I think is a fairly good understanding of the typical family Christmas day.

I had a bit of an internal dilemma as to whether I should try at all since I had been a critic, but I had collected seven coins and curiosity got the better of me, and I managed to log on at about 4.30pm and won a Palm Z Plane from Iwoot.com.

Many thanks to Affiliate Window and their merchants (and Iwoot.com especially) for the generous promotion. Some of the prizes, such as a TV, mountain bike and an actual website, sound outstanding.

My post on the subject of the giveaway's timing seemed to raise the ire of award winning blogger, Kieron Donoghue, who interrupted his planned day off from blogging on the 25th to say:

Affiliate Window and their merchants are giving us the opportunity to win prizes and you bloody well moan because it isn’t convenient for you?

The fact that it wasn't convenient for me personally wasn't actually the issue but rather I suspected many - but clearly not all - affiliates would be, quite understandably, otherwise occupied at 3pm on Christmas day with all the normal family commitments which are associated with a day like that.

I think if Affiliate Window had said the giveaway was at 5 o'clock in the morning, other people might have said "hang on, that's an odd time". And if you are able to accept in principle that it's not unreasonable, ungrateful or "bizarre" to hold or express an opinion about the appropriateness of the time, then there's a valid discussion about that which can follow without descending into personal digs. I don't resile from any of the points I made on the timing and am happy to use my blog to give feedback to them where I think it's called for.

My own view of the "Christmas spirit", or lack thereof, is perhaps not fashionable in increasingly secular times. But, that aside, you'd have to say it's been a successful promotion on the whole so I'm pleased to congratulate Affiliate Window on a laudable effort.

Labels: affiliate window

I received a nice introduction to the LEGO program on Linkshare in the post a few weeks back. There was a little keyring as a free gift (thanks!), information about the program and pictures of the contacts at Linkshare who run it all. I thought it was a really neat way to get my interest.

Then, the other day, I received a glossy little leaflet in the post with details of hot upcoming products and pictures of banner ads that are available. Again, it really got my attention.

There may be a reasonable environmental argument against printing stuff out in hard copy and posting it out, but I'd have to say, compared to a mass of emails which it's all to easy to skim through, it really makes a difference to receive information in the post and makes me think that this is a program I want to promote next year.

Labels: lego, linkshare

REST (Representational State Transfer) allows for distributed computing with data transactions available using HTTP, URLs and XML. What this means is that you can call information from a data source over HTTP, using a correctly formed URL and get your results delivered to you in XML format, which you can work with using something like ASP.net or PHP to format and display on a web page.

Because URLs are central to how we use the web already, the URL-driven approach of REST makes accessing web services really easy to understand. In essence, you construct a URL where the parameters define the data you want, and the data store sends back the results as XML which you can the process and display as you wish. An example might look like this:

http://domainabouttoys/webservices.aspx?toyname=disney&maxprice=20

Even a non developer could look at that and have a fairly good idea that it's attempting to retrieve a list of Disney toys under £20 from a data store.. This is great because it makes tapping into data nice and easy, and performance is good because requests are cached.

Amazon's web services are already available using REST (I'm still planning to post a nice example soon), and I've also used XML over HTTP from LateRooms.com to create a hotel site with an always up to date list of hotels. Once you have coded your site, the data is pulled live from the the source which means you can build the site once and forget it. Compare and contrast this with needing to download and upload a product feed file.

Microsoft seem to have bought into how effective this is, and are pushing these methods with the recent announcement of ADO.NET Data Services (previously known as project "Astoria"), which provides the libraries and tools for developers to make their data stores available in this flexible way.

I hope to see REST used more often in affiliate marketing in 2008. If a network already stores all their merchant product feeds in a database, implementing this interface will mean affiliates can use up to date product information without the need for working with large, cumbersome product feed files. Credit must, of course, go to networks already making product feed web services available such as Affiliate Window, who at the moment support SOAP/WSDL for their API. I read an interesting statistic that where REST and SOAP are both available on Amazon Web Services, 85% of users opt for REST.

Find out more about REST
REST and the Real World
REST: Simplicity in Web Services Design
REST vs SOAP with Amazon API

Find out more about ADO.Net Data Services
MS Live Labs
Wikipedia

Labels: REST, web services, xml

Well, only a few hours to go until Christmas day. Hope the Christmas period gave your figures a decent lift. I'd say my numbers were good but not sensational, but there's always next year!

As I struggled around the shops yesterday, in search of an affordable digital photo frame, I realised that was a niche I should have paid more attention too. I assumed they were quite popular, but they seem to have been one of the smash hits of the season with many large shops simply selling out. In fact, one donut really got on my nerves in Currys.Digital when he told me with such relish "All sold out" - with his stupid smirk somehow adding the thought "you left it too late, you fool". I did manage to find quite a few in PC World though.

One of the things that also occurred when I was in a packed John Lewis Oxford Street was that there were some very nice laptop and computer displays with a large number of people looking at them. Never one to miss out on the chance of some extra "eyeballs" for my websites, I couldn't fight the urge to open up internet explorer and leave them on some of my websites. Personally I think it enhanced the display...



John Lewis stocked one of the must have toys this Christmas, Butterscotch the Pony from Fur Real. In store the price was £299.99. But goto the website and the price is £250. Similarly, I just reserved and collected a kettle from Currys for £29.99 which involved me calling upon two members of staff (one to take payment, one to fetch the item). Going into the shop and buying the item off the shelf myself, and only requiring one member of staff to take payment, would have got £39.99. I don't understand the logic of that at all. From a consumer point of view, I hope eventually that retailers will stop the disparity between web prices and shop prices and find a better strategy.

Having used a few internet shops before Christmas, my gold star goes to Play.com for taking an order on Thu night for some excellently priced electronic items and getting them to me Saturday morning. Ordering from Currys online wasn't quite as good - it took 3 days to get an email with order confirmation and then the packaging was falling apart when it got here.

Thanks to everyone that stopped by the blog this year. Hope you all have a great Christmas and brilliant 2008.

Labels: christmas

Affiliate Window have posted a reminder on their blog that you should head over to their site at 3pm on Christmas day to claim a free present, if you have been collecting the "coins" in the run up to Xmas. There are 450 presents available, and 1200 affiliates who have collected coins. I forgot one week and have 7 coins collected.

Now, who wouldn't want a free gift at Christmas, and who knows what it might be. The gifts could be something totally cool, or they may not. But am I alone in thinking it's actually a little bit distasteful to promote some mad scramble for gifts between affiliates on what really should be a family day and a day away from all this.

Many affiliates have worked hard all year. There's a reasonable chance that affiliates will be relaxing with their families at 3pm on Christmas day, having perhaps just enjoyed their dinner or about to have it. Many will welcome the opportunity to get away from the family for five minutes no doubt, but others just won't be in a position to go logging onto Affiliate Window's website - and why should they.

I don't want to be churlish about it, and maybe I should just be a little more grateful, like Tiny Tim perhaps. It's a really nice idea to give Christmas presents to affiliates, and how they choose to do it is their call, but I just don't get the thinking behind attempting to disrupt what should really just be a day off for everyone. Personally I won't be near a computer, and may try and get on from my mobile phone, but the very idea behind the timing leaves a sour taste in my mouth - and that's usually a job best left to brussel sprouts on Christmas day.

Labels: affiliate window

Link building can be boring and arduous task. I don't really like doing it but I recognise if I want to get quality links, I need to invest the time in seeking out appropriate link partners, find their contact details and write a bespoke message, or even snail mail letter, asking for a link swap to be considered.

In the last few weeks I've received 3 link requests, actually from well two known affiliates, which seem to me to be really lazy. When I first received it, I could tell it didn't "scan" like an email wrote specifically to me. This was kind of confirmed when I received an identical email the following week. And then the same email again from somewhere else. I'm guessing it's generated by some script or maybe even an outsourced service.

The emails are like this:

We`re building relationships with sites relevant to `dressing up games` (we found you via the search engines - if this term isn`t a focus area for you, we cover a vast range of retail categories and should therefore be able to find an appropriate subject).

There are two possibilities:

1) We can hand write some content (around 2-300 words) for you to add to a page on toysandvideogames.co.uk. This will be relevant to both of our sites and will contain a single text link in it back to a relevant content page on our site.

- OR -

2) We can trade links with you, directly from a relevant content page on XXXXX (not a links page or directory). We will explain where links are located (on properly indexed and ranked pages) when you reply. We can either do this directly or as a `three way` type link if you prefer.

Funnily enough, the offer is not unattractive but when I see a template email like that, I just kind of switch of and am not interested. There's a slight irony because one of them came from an affiliate who has quite publicly blogged about the way not to write emails if you want to catch his attention.

Or am I just just being over sensitive? Maybe these type of emails work and find a more receptive audience with others than they do with me. But personally I find it a bit naff. The email goes on to say that my site was carefully selected which I don't even believe. When I carefully select a site and have a link proposition, I don't then spoil it all by sending something so obviously not specifically directed at them.

Labels: link building

I wrote a blog post last year on the subject of sales notifications. In the post, I mentioned that I used the Affiliate Window application to receive notification of sales. Since then, Buy.at have launched a widget which does a similar job, synchronising itself with your stats every few minutes and letting you know when a sale has come through. That's all well and good but I really like to minimise what I install on my PC to keep it nice and spritely.

I mentioned in my post how RegNow sends you an email when you get a sale. I was really pleased to see when I logged onto Paid On Results the other day, for the first time in a while, that they now have this functionality too and I can get an email alert when a sale is made. Definitely one of the reasons why "do more work with POR merchants" remains on my to do list for next year.

Who else offers this? I think DirectTrack based networks probably have this functionality available, but I'd really like to see everyone offer it. Maybe email isn't as sexy as new toys, or maybe sending large volumes of email introduces a new point of failure that networks want to avoid, but personally speaking, it's a really convenient way for me to keep tabs on sales, with email's automatically being assigned to a folder gmail label so I can geta quick overview of activity when I go into my inbox - and whilst I'm in the can't be bothered mood, it saves me looking it up.

Labels: sales notifications

Yes, I know Christmas is the high point of an affiliate's year and I should be busy cashing in on the huge amount of online spending that's taking place and I am to a certain extent through work I have already done in preparation, but this month I've really been hit by "can't be bothered" syndrome.

I've updated sites here and there when I've seen offers worth promoting, and tinkered where needed, but on the whole my work rate has ground to a near halt. My days at the moment are consisting of waking up late, re-watching Spooks from the first episode, playing Mario Galaxy, elaborate lunches and meandering around the shops to get some Christmas present ideas.

I actually think this is one of the dangers of being a moderately successful affiliate. When you have sites in place that earn you a reasonable living, it's perhaps easy, for me at least, to think "oh well, that'll do" and just coast along, indulging in the laziness that my worker bee sites allow me.

I have been at the PC a fair bit but I just haven't actually done much work. Although that in itself raises a question - if I am at the PC, am I working? I find that the nature of the job is that actually whenever you surf the web, you are consuming information and the brain is whirring away looking for opportunities, angles or content ideas within that information. That may qualify as work - research and development? - but after a few hours it can be a bit mind numbing and leave you with a sense of having just wasted time and not achieved anything.

One of the reasons I can't be bothered is because I know I will be super busy next month. The new year is like a natural catalyst for renewed efforts and ideas, so I'm enjoying my laziness at the moment and storing ideas at the back of my mind ready for a big new effort in 2008 to take things up a level.

Labels: lazy