How can I track the sales rank of an item on Amazon programatically?

Question

I've seen several products that will track the sales rank of an item on Amazon. Does Amazon have any web-services published that I can use to get the sales rank of a particular item?

I've looked through the AWS and didn't see anything of that nature.

Answer 1

You should be able to determine the Sales Rank by querying for the SalesRank response group when doing an ItemLookup with the Amazon Associates Web Service.

Example query:

http://ecs.amazonaws.com/onca/xml?
Service=AWSECommerceService&
AWSAccessKeyId=[AWS Access Key ID]&
Operation=ItemLookup&
ItemId=0976925524&
ResponseGroup=SalesRank&
Version=2008-08-19

Response:

<Item>
  <ASIN>0976925524</ASIN> 
  <SalesRank>68</SalesRank> 
</Item>

See the documentation here: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSECommerceService/2008-08-19/DG/index.html?RG_SalesRank.html

Answer 2

Amazon have changed their API so it now requires a signature: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/ann.jspa?annID=483 so the above example no longer works from August 2009 onwards.