Amazon is unquestionably the world’s largest online retailer. For 25 years, it has grown from a small garage startup to a multinational sales and technology leader.
As a result, the amount of data about the products they sell on their marketplaces is enormous, and they have chosen not to share it. The sales giant provides product information through APIs, allowing developers to build services around it.
What exactly is the Amazon Product API?
The Amazon Product API is a service that gives you access to Amazon’s huge database of products listed on their marketplaces. In general, it provides the majority of the functionality found on their website through an Application Programming Interface. That is to say:
Product Search: Similar to the Amazon search bar at the top of their website, Product Search allows you to find products by using keywords.
Product Information: obtain product information such as price and brand.
Customer Reviews include, among other things, product ratings.
This enables developers to create an infinite number of services based on the Amazon API, and Zylalabs has a number of APIs available to seamlessly interface with the giant’s service.
We’ll show you how to use the Amazon Product API in this article. We’ll create a service that allows you to search for a product using keywords, see its current price, and view a price report.
The sequence will be as follows:
- The user accesses our web service and sees a search bar.
- The user types in some keywords.
- ZylaIabs requests the Amazon Check Price and Search Items API on our behalf and returns a list of results.
- We present these results to the user in the form of a table, with a picture of the product, title, price, and so on.
The best way to install Ruby is to follow their official installation guide. You can also see a quick overview of some of the different frameworks available for building your applications here. This time, we’re going with Sinatra because of its ease of use and quick setup. In any case, what we’ll write here can be quickly ported to any Ruby framework.
First, we will configure our application and the first page, which will contain our search form. In the interest of simplicity, we will keep all of our services in a single archive, but Sinatra allows for the division of his application into multiple archives for greater ease of maintenance. For the time being, only create an app-named app.rb
Before proceeding with the next steps, ZYLA API gives the option of offering a monthly without payment model, which means they have a plan without paying with limited features that are available at any time. And the paid plans are required to pay as a small subscription that gives significantly better and expanded performance features.
This API would be ideal for supplier sellers who want to retrieve real-time data from Amazon in order to create better decisions. This API can also be used to create a program in which you create notifications for your customers and advise them when a product of their selection is at its lowest price, allowing them to run and purchase it immediately.‘Amazon Check Price and Search Items API’ will also assist marketing firms in studying about product price changes and the markets movement literally every time.
It is now safe to proceed. We can now consult the API and obtain search results.
We hope this article gave you a first idea of how to start working with the Amazon Product API using Ruby. What you learned here can easily be applied to other Ruby frameworks like Ruby on Rails or Roda. Note that the amazon ASIN codes API provides more than what was discussed here. That means you can extend the service we built a bit further by using the priceReport endpoint to display some more price details, like high and low prices, plus the price of the product in a used state.