Aquarionics

Amazon Links

A tutorial, or guide, to Amazon Item Links, and making them usable.

An amazon link is made up of four parts, server, path, asin and session.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000050ABX/202-0443038-0326228
\--------------------/ \--------------/ \--------/ \-----------------/
Site Name Script Code # Session Ref.

See below for an update, it gets shorter

The first part, or Server, is the physical server to use when referring to the object, it can be any one of amazon.co.uk .com, .co.jp, .co.dk, .co.ca or whatever they have opened today. It is required.

The second part, or path, is almost always /exec/obidos/, and is mandatory.

The third part is the Amazon System Identification Number, or ASIN, consisting of that phrase, plus a string identifying the item.

The fourth and final part is everything after the asin number, and is known as the Session, identifying your personal access of the database system. It is not any kind of security risk to add this to links, because should you access this session from a new IP - or after a length of time - it becomes invalid, but is not necessary for people to get to your item. For example, the optimal link to the above is: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385602642/

Furthermore, it should be noted that if you place the id of an Amazon Affiliate in place of the session, then a percentage of your purchase will go towards that affiliate. (It's one of the few ways Aquarionics comes close to paying for it's bandwidth).

For example, for that link to donate a percentage (ranging from 5 to 15%) to the Buy Aquarion A Clié Fund, the link would be the following:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385602642/aquarion

Also, it is very rare for any amazon link (minus session) to be more than 72 chars, thus avoiding linewrap.

This has been a public service announcement, on behalf of makea shorta linka corp.

Sponsored by snackyspores.

2004-06-25 According to the new Amazon Hacks book, you can shorten this even further by replacing the "/exec/obidos" with "/o", so the above link becomes:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/o/ASIN/B000050ABX/202-0443038-0326228
\---------------------/ \----/ \--------/ \-----------------/
Site Name Script Code# Session Ref.