Amazon Hacks

Publish Your Associate Sales Statistics on Your Site

Share some insider knowledge with your site’s audience.

Your web site has a unique audience, and looking at what they purchase through your associate links can tell you more about them. It can provide insights into other items you might want to sell, and can illustrate what’s foremost on their minds (for better or worse). Just as Amazon shares its aggregated sales information in the form of purchase circles, you can create your own purchase circle list by publishing your associate sale information.

Your readers are probably just as curious about sales trends through your site as you are. Publishing the list can build a sense of community, and also drive more sales through associate links.

You could save the HTML reports available through your associates account (http://associates.amazon.com), but it’d be much easier to automate the process and integrate it into your site design with a few lines of Perl.

The Code

To run this code, you’ll need to set the email address and password you use to log into your associates account. This script will then log into the account and download the appropriate sales report. Once the script has the report, it will reformat it as HTML.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w # get_earnings_report.pl # # Logs into Amazon, downloads earning report, # and writes an HTML version for your site. # Usage: perl get_earnings_report.pl use warnings; use strict; use URI::Escape; use HTTP::Cookies; use LWP::UserAgent; # Set your associates ...