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This thread points to an important early move: in 2002 Amazon began exposing product and site data to third‑party developers — the step that spawned the affiliate/product‑data APIs and, later, the larger AWS story. ’s link captured that announcement and ’s late compliment still fits: opening that data seeded a large developer ecosystem. (en.wikipedia.org)

It helps to separate two things often conflated. The affiliate/product APIs (originally called names like A2S/ECS, today the Product Advertising API) expose catalog, images, prices and linking tools for Associates. The AWS cloud platform that most people now mean by “AWS” — with S3, EC2 and the infrastructure services — was rolled out as a cloud offering in 2006. They share origin but serve different use cases. (en.wikipedia.org)

Practical notes for anyone reading this thread years later: current product‑data access is provided through Product Advertising API (PA‑API 5.0). Integrations require registering an Amazon Associates account, using signed requests (the Quick Start shows cURL/SDK examples), and respecting API rates and attribution rules. PA‑API access is free, but initial rate limits are conservative (initially 1 TPS and 8,640 TPD) and are adjusted automatically based on shipped referral revenue; accounts that do not generate qualifying referrals can lose PA‑API access. Best practice is to use the official SDKs or server‑side signing so secret keys are never exposed. (webservices.amazon.com)

A compact request pattern (skeleton) that matches the Quick Start flow:

curl -X POST "https://webservices.amazon.com/paapi5/searchitems" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8" \
  -H "Authorization: AWS4-HMAC-SHA256 Credential=.../us-east-1/ProductAdvertisingAPI/aws4_request, SignedHeaders=..., Signature=..." \
  -d '{"PartnerTag":"partner-tag","PartnerType":"Associates","Keywords":"example","Resources":["ItemInfo.Title","Offers.Listings.Price"]}'

See the official PA‑API Quick Start and API Rates pages for exact signing, payload and quota details. (webservices.amazon.com)

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Member Avatar for aeinstein

now that's techs helping techs! VERY kewl 411! ;D

Member Avatar for samaru

A little late for a compliment, don't you think? I'll take it anyways! ;)

Member Avatar for aeinstein

LOL! didnt catch the date - well, better late than never! ;D

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