If you've ever landed on Amazon.com then you're probably familiar with their reviews and wish lists. Amazon provides access to these items (and many-many more) through their extensive web services - the Amazon web services can be complex and overwhelming when all you want is a review list and a single user specific wish list. For this site I wanted to pull in my reviews and wish list - displaying them alongside my blog. It's fair to note, that user reviews are available via an RSS feed (but this feed doesn't include all the details I wanted) and the wish list page still doesn't provide an RSS feed. So a custom Amazon web service request was in order.

Let me try to make this story short.

If you want to request your reviews and your wish list you need the following:

• An Amazon Account: http://www.amazon.com/gp/css/homepage.html with at least a wish list or a review.
• An Amazon Associates tag: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/join/ (this will be your AssociatesTag).
• An Amazon Web Service (AWS) access key: http://aws.amazon.com/ (this will be your AWSAccessKey).
  

Once you have a wish list or review, you then need to:

• Get your CustomerId for the reviews. I found my CustomerId by navigating to my reviews (http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A2JM0EQJELFL69/) then pulling out 'A2JM0EQJELFL69' (the last element of the url).
• Get your ListId for your wish list.  I found my ListId by navigating to my wishlist (http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/registry.html/?id=3JU6ASKNUS7B8) then pulling out '3JU6ASKNUS7B8' (the identifier after id= from the url).

Once you've collected all those bits, you need to:

• Checkout and download the source code for the project and build the assembly or download the pre-compiled assembly.
• Add the assembly reference to your project (remember, I'm assuming you're using .NET).
• Make a call to the application which will generate XML files containing your respective reviews and wish list.

Setting up the call would look something like this:

IAmazonRequest amazonRequest = new AmazonRequest() {
     AssociateTag = "adamkahtavaap-20",
     AWSAccessKeyId = "1MRF________MR2",
     CustomerId = "A2JM0EQJELFL69",
     ListId = "3JU6ASKNUS7B8"
};

IFileParameters fileParameters = new FileParameters() {
     ProductFileNameAndPath = @"Products.xml",
     ReviewFileNameAndPath = @"Reviews.xml",
     ErrorFileNameAndPath = @"Errors.xml"  
};

IAmazonApplication amazonApplication = new AmazonApplication(amazonRequest, fileParameters);

amazonApplication.Save();

   And Viola!

• At this point you can do anything with your XML files (Products.xml, Reviews.xml, Errors.xml). I've consumed mine through an ASP.NET Repeater and displayed the contents within a web page (see it live here, view the code here).

If you'd like to provide some design guidance, fix a bug, or request a feature, then visit (or join) the project on Google Code.

Alternatively, you might also be interested in the LINQ To Amazon source featured in the book LINQ in Action.

Happy coding!