Superstar developer John Krystynak (he also built Texsy and Aytozon) dropped me a little "by the way" about his latest creation, the Amazon Prime Finder.
Amazon Prime, for those of you who don't know, is our "all you can eat" (or read, or listen to) shipping plan. After payment of an annual fee, all of your eligible purchases are shipped using two-day shipping at no further cost.
John notes that he was inspired by Alan Taylor's use of JavaScript and JSON to call Amazon ECS directly from the browser. John told me:
It's one of the simplest things I've done - but I've got a ton of people who are happier with it than anything else. Really credit goes to Kokogiak, because I just modified his stuff and added the "Amazon Prime" search parts.
One of my Amazon buddies told me:
His Prime hack is awesome. My mom has been asking me about something like this for months, so I sent it to her. He'll get some nice fees from her alone.
-- Jeff;
PS - Given the intriguing domain name hosting Amazon Prime Finder, I don't think we've heard the last from John.
John,
How did you determine if a product is eligible for Amazon Prime? Does ECS already support such a feature?
Thanks.
Posted by: Alex Choo | October 05, 2006 at 10:38 PM
Alex,
I looked for Condition = New, Availability = Available, and then I filter out products where the Merchant ID is not Amazon's.
I don't think the API offers any direct way to determine Amazon Prime status - I looked on the ecs forums and found a posting that said the API doesn't have it.
The site doesn't offer it either... at least not in any obvious way.
Posted by: John K | October 07, 2006 at 08:24 PM
This is an absolutely vital tool for Amazon search. I have written to Amazon Customer Service a dozen times complaining that I cannot find very common items "sold by and shipped from" Amazon--it's all these shoddy little merchants who don't maintain inventory, use the postal service, get the addresses wrong, and take weeks to ship. Just two days ago I tried to find all six ink cartridges for a new HP C7180 printer (itself just bought from Amazon) and after ONE HOUR of searching was unable to find them sold by Amazon itself. Today, using this wonderful tool, I was able to find and order my six ink cartridges in just a couple of minutes. (Amazon now proposes to take over warehousing and fulfillment for the third-party merchants--that is the only hope for Amazon. Its own quality of online inventory, prompt and accurate shipment, and use of private couriers sets a standard that the little fry just cannot match.)
Posted by: seeker | October 15, 2006 at 05:13 PM
Kokogiak's work never ceases to prove its usefulness. :)
Posted by: Scott Johnson | October 19, 2006 at 02:33 PM
I had the same problem and came up with my own solution, www.isearchbetter.com, without knowing about Krystynak's work. I guess a good problem deserves many solutions. Anyway, iSearchBetter.com does pretty much the same thing as Krystynak's site, but with a different different interface. It also seems to give more comprehensive results for some searches. Anyway, nice work John!
Posted by: vitasthefetus | October 25, 2006 at 04:27 AM
Thanks for this wonderful search tool! I just sent an email to Amazon about my issues of not finding the item that is eligible for Prime. I did a search and lo and behold I wasn't the only who felt the same way. :) Thanks for such a useful tool! :)
Posted by: JOhn | March 17, 2008 at 06:36 AM
This must be very difficult to accomplish, as this is the only search engine I've been able to find for Prime items. Unfortunately the link is dead http://www.bigscreenprices.com/amazonprime.html
Posted by: Brent | January 09, 2010 at 07:58 AM