Not only is Amazon a popular e-commerce
site, but it is an e-commerce platform this is easily remixed with other content. Although you
will study the Amazon APIs later in this book, you??™ll focus here on Amazon from the view of an
end user. Moreover, the goal in this section is not to learn all the features of Amazon but rather
to study its URL language.
?– Note Although Amazon sells merchandise other than books, I use books in my examples. Moreover,
I focus on Amazon, the site geared to the United States instead of Amazon??™s network of sites aimed to customers
outside the United States.
The strategy you??™ll follow here is to discern the key entities of the Amazon site through
a combination of using and experimenting with the site, sifting through documentation, and
seeing what other users have done. You will see that figuring out the structure of Amazon??™s
URLs is not as straightforward as working through the Flickr URL language. Since some of the
conclusions here are not supported by official documentation from Amazon, I cannot make
any long-term guarantee behind the URLs.
Amazon Items
It doesn??™t take much analysis of Amazon to see that the central entity of the site is an item for
sale (akin to a photo in Flickr). By looking at the URL of a given item and looking throughout
a page describing it, you will see that Amazon uses an Amazon Standard Identification Number
(ASIN) as a unique identifier for its products.
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