Amazon Hacks

Show the Progress of Your Honor System Fund on Your Site

You can let Amazon calculate the progress of a fund drive by scraping the graph that appears on your PayPage.

If your use of the Amazon Honor System is in connection with a drive for a certain amount of money, you show your progress with a graph on your PayPage. To add a graph to a PayPage, go to your list of pages and click “Edit.” Scroll down to section D, “Your Goal Chart and Payment Counter,” and click “Edit.” From there, you can choose your target amount and whether or not to display the graph or payment counter.

If you show the graph on your PayPage, people will know how far along you are in your drive and how far you have to go. Unfortunately it’s available only on your Amazon PayPage, so you can’t indicate the progress as easily on your own site. You can scrape the information to display it locally, though.

The Code

This code requests your PayPage at Amazon and slices out the table with your goal chart. Keep in mind that the regular expressions used here could become obsolete the next time Amazon changes the HTML layout of their PayPages.

<?php
$paypageURL = "insert your PayPage URL";
$payPage = "";

//Get Amazon PayPage based on ID
$contents = fopen($paypageURL,"r");
while (!feof ($contents))
    $payPage .= fgets($contents, 4096);
fclose ($contents);

if (preg_match_all('/<table border=0 cellpadding=1 cellspacing=0 [RETURN]
width=190>.*?Goal Chart.*?<\/table>.*?<\/table>.*?<\/table>/[RETURN] s',$payPage,$chartTable)) { echo ...