To find out about an Amazon customer, the first task is to find their customer ID. To do that, you must know either their name or e-mail address. E-mail addresses are guaranteed to be unique; names are not. So, use the customer's e-mail address if possible. If you don't know it, use their name.

The following request looks up the customer ID for (a fictitious person) Joe Schmo:

http://ecs.amazonaws.com/onca/xml?
Service=AWSECommerceService&
AWSAccessKeyId=[AWS Access Key ID]&
Operation=CustomerContentSearch&
Name=Joe%20Schmo

	Important
	You must never display customer IDs publicly. You may use them in requests only to look up information. You may associate that information with a customer's name or nickname but never his or her customer ID.

The following snippet from the response shows Joe's customer ID and nickname.

<Customer>
  <CustomerId>A3EXAMPLEX53</CustomerId>
  <Nickname>SmokinJoe</Nickname>
</Customer>

The customer ID provides the input necessary to find out information about Joe.