Organization of Items for Sale on Amazon
Topics
For a vast majority of customers, their first task when coming to an e-commerce web site is finding something to buy. They might want to buy a camera, a book, or a piece of jewelry. If you were to walk into a store with relatively few items for sale, the task of finding what you want might be easy. If, however, the store you walk into has thousands of shelves and hundreds of thousands of items for sale, finding what you want presents its own challenge. In such a store, a good store owner would arrange items in a way that would help customers quickly find the items they want to buy. Such is the case with Amazon.
Amazon has literally hundreds of thousands of items for sale. Product Advertising API operations and response groups give you the tools you need to find the items in the store that you want quickly. Before understanding the search mechanisms that Product Advertising API operations provide and the filtering mechanisms that Product Advertising API response groups provide, it is important to first understand the way in which Amazon groups items for sale.
Related Items
The RelatedItems response group returns information about items
related to the one specified in an ItemLookup request. The item is specified in an
ItemLookup request. Digital items include downloadable music
(search index: MP3Downloads), downloadable video (search index: UnboxVideo), and digital
books (search index: KindleStore). A related item could be, for example, all of the
shows in a TV series that are available separately, or, for example, all of the songs on
a CD.
The basis upon which the item(s) are related is specified by the RelationshipType parameter. The RelatedItems
response group requires that you include in the ItemLookup request
the RelationshipType parameter. Sample values include Episode,
Season, Tracks, and Variation. For a complete list of values, see ItemLookup.
Each ItemLookup request can return, at most, ten related items.
To return additional items, use the RelateditemsPage parameter. A
value of 2, for example, returns the second set of ten related items.For more
information, go to the ItemLookup. page.