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Show HN: Amazon Instant, weekend project

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Re: Show HN: Amazon Instant, weekend project

#3
post #2

Sorry but what's the point? Like what issue with amazon search are you trying to solve? Cool weekend project either way. Props.

Good question -- it's not really solving anything, it's just a different way of viewing Amazon products in a slightly more slick interface. It might save you a few seconds on a search, or it might not.

I mostly just wanted to play around with the Amazon API and AJAX calls. Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Amazon Instant, weekend project

#4
post #3
post #2

Sorry but what's the point? Like what issue with amazon search are you trying to solve? Cool weekend project either way. Props.

Good question -- it's not really solving anything, it's just a different way of viewing Amazon products in a slightly more slick interface. It might save you a few seconds on a search, or it might not. I mostly just wanted to play around with the Amazon API and AJAX calls. Thanks!

Which API are you using? Didn't know they had a product API.

Re: Show HN: Amazon Instant, weekend project

#6
post #4
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question -- it's not really solving anything, it's just a different way of viewing Amazon products in a slightly more slick interface. It might save you a few seconds on a search, or it might not. I mostly just wanted to play around with the Amazon API and AJAX calls. Thanks!

Which API are you using? Didn't know they had a product API.

Check out Amazon's Product Advertising API: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/deta...

It supports Item Lookup, Item Search, Cart Creation, etc. Pretty cool!

Re: Show HN: Amazon Instant, weekend project

#7
post #3
post #2

Sorry but what's the point? Like what issue with amazon search are you trying to solve? Cool weekend project either way. Props.

Good question -- it's not really solving anything, it's just a different way of viewing Amazon products in a slightly more slick interface. It might save you a few seconds on a search, or it might not. I mostly just wanted to play around with the Amazon API and AJAX calls. Thanks!

And you didn't set it up so that you can get "up to 8.5% in referral fees when the users you refer to Amazon sites buy qualifying products"?

Re: Show HN: Amazon Instant, weekend project

#8
I get the impression that if this wasn't calling on a third-party API (ie if you were indexing the product listings yourself) you'd be able to give more "instant" results, but this is a cool take on search on Amazon (although obviously inspired by Google and other instant search features). I also imagine Amazon would blacklist you for harvesting their product listing, although since you're still giving them referrals maybe they wouldn't. I guess if you called it "aggressive caching" you might get away with it, heh.

While you're re-thinking product search, why not consider higher-resolution/larger thumbnails, a few more products per "page", etc...? I'm not advocating a Pinterest clone or anything like that, but the initial load (10 items in 2 rows) looks a little... dated and spartan.

As said before, cool short-term project. Would be interesting to see a few more features built into this, especially if it made your search "competitive" with Amazon's implementation.

Re: Show HN: Amazon Instant, weekend project

#9

I get the impression that if this wasn't calling on a third-party API (ie if you were indexing the product listings yourself) you'd be able to give more "instant" results, but this is a cool take on search on Amazon (although obviously inspired by Google and other instant search features). I also imagine Amazon would blacklist you for harvesting their product listing, although since you're still giving them referrals…

I think it would be really interesting to download the entire listing and watch how volatile everything is, especially the item prices. Searching would definitely be much faster as well.

Thanks for checking it out and thanks for the suggestions!

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