Amazon API - retrieve product description

Question

Does anyone know how to retrieve the product description from the Amazon API? I have asked their forum with no success. I can access the detailed page URL from an ItemLookUp but then I have to screenscrape which is not ideal.

Thanks, Steve

Answer 1

Hey, I know this is a bit old, but I've found the EditorialReview part of the response contains the product description. I guess the cravet that Tom talks about still applies, but at least its a way to get to the description without reverting to screen scraping (which is never a good thing!) :)

See this page of the Amazon product API: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/

EditorialReview Response Group

For each item in the response, the EditorialReview response group returns Amazon's review of the item, which, on the Detail page, is labeled the Product Description.

No nasty screen scraping required! :)

Andy.

Answer 2

You can retrieve it like this apparently (wont work, wrong key):

http://ecs.amazonaws.de/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService&AWSAccessKeyId=1EYQH7NQ7HMKEGDPVZ82&Operation=ItemLookup&ItemId=3492233198&ResponseGroup=Large,ItemAttributes,Images,Offers,EditorialReview,Subjects,Reviews

Taken from Amazon Developer Forum:

Similar issue was discussed at http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=16331&tstart=0. Amazon does not own all the content that appears on the retail site and some of it is licensed from third parties who limit the ways in which their intellectual property is allowed to be reproduced. As a result, we need to filter out some editorial reviews / contents from public responses when querying via ECS.

So be careful screenscraping, it might be breaking copyright. Also check that the data you are attempting to retrive is allowed.