New ECS Features - Product Promotions via API and RSS

The newest release of ECS provides both an API and a set of RSS feeds to allow developers direct access to promotions.

What are promotions? Glad you asked!

Promotions are short-term special deals that help customers to make purchases sooner rather than later, and which allow merchants to provide more attractive offers in a competitive retail environment. A promotion for a particular ASIN could be anyone one of the following:

• Buy 3 items and get a 4th one for free.
• Get 10% off of a purchase.
• Save $20 on a purchase of $100 or more.
• Free shipping.

At Amazon we have found that promotions are a key tool for driving additional sales and for increasing the ever-important conversion ratio (shoppers vs. buyers).

ECS now includes two new response groups, PromotionDetail and PromotionSummary. As you can probably guess, these new response groups return details and summary information for the promotions associated with an ASIN, respectively. The following information is returned:

• Full description of the promotion including the benefits offered.
• Merchant offering the promotion.
• The claim code that allows the customer to cash in on the promotion.
• Restrictions on the use of the promotion.
• Terms and conditions.

Using this information you can easily display the appropriate promotions in your application. You could even build an application that is focused around promotions -- the "10% Off Store", or the "Buy 2 Get 1 Free Store." As always, if you do something creative like this, let me know so that I can blog about it and demo it to my conference and user group audiences.

Finally, there are a set of 3 RSS feeds, updated each day, which enumerate the current set of active promotions:

• Dollar Off Promotions
• Percent Off Promotions
• Buy X Get Y Promotions

If you look closely at those URLs, you will see that they are stored, appropriately enough, in Amazon S3.

There's more information about the newest ECS release in the release notes.

-- Jeff;

Comments

[MrRat]

I used an RSS mod for phpBB to add those feeds as posts to my forums.

http://www.absolutefreebies.com/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=13

A very easy way to add content to my site.

[Marc Mezzacca]

Very nice Jeff. I'll definitely be taking advantage of this. I'll let you know when its implemented.