Amazon's Web

 

Success in business comes to those who not only work hard but also work smart. The laws of business success dictate that one must habitually innovate so as to create options that will propel you to the front of the pack.

There is no doubt that in the e-commerce arena, Amazon is one company that strives hard to work smart and keeps on innovating. So it is not surprising that it is staying at the top of the e-commerce pack. It is the largest and, arguably, the coolest online store around.

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There seems to be unbounded creativity flowing within the Amazon team and it regularly comes out with newer ways to enhance the customer experience and provide good offerings. These creative programs have helped it to maintain a growth rate of 26 percent even in this economy, and enabled its market-cap to go up threefold over the last 12 months.

Last year, Amazon came out with yet another good creative idea--Amazon Web Services.

In the Internet arena, affiliate marketing and referral sales have strong impact on the overall sales of a vendor, and Amazon always had strong programs to make use of this form of sales channel. Just by considering the number of websites that are in Amazon's Associates program, one could deduce that a good portion of its revenue comes through this channel.

So it is not surprising that Amazon would like to improve its associates program so as to increase sales through it. Amazon Web Services are designed to do that. It not only helps Amazon increase its own sales but also it helps the websites which implement it to increase their sales.

Many websites act as Amazon's affiliates and sell its product through their sites. Many others use Amazon's platform to sell their own products. Amazon Web Services help both types of websites to boost their sales.

Amazon Web Services is a set of APIs that allows users (websites) to query the complete Amazon database. This facilitates creation of online stores that are more closely aligned with Amazon's offering.

Now it is easier, quicker and more efficient to build cutting-edge e-commerce applications that leverage Amazon's experience and its huge product catalog. By using calls to Amazon Web Services, websites could retrieve product information dynamically from Amazon, format it any way they want and never bother to maintain the product information on their own. They can also design applications to share with other Amazon.com customers, merchants, associates or website owners.

How to Go About It?
Web services are applications that can be invoked across the Web. They present a communication protocol for applications to interact. A Web service is a URL-addressable software resource that performs functions and answers queries.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers applications that range from retrieving information about a set of products to adding an item to a shopping cart. These applications could be accessed through XML over HTTP or through a SOAP interface.

The access through XML over HTTP uses URIs with specific name/value pairs to invoke methods and processes within Amazon's Web Services framework. After processing the URI, AWS returns a well-formatted XML document in response.

SOAP, on the other hand, is a simple XML based protocol that lets applications exchange information over HTTP. It is a client-server paradigm. In this implementation, Amazon's SOAP Server receives from the client SOAP requests containing procedure calls, decodes them and packages a SOAP response and sends it back.

There are various ways that one could access AWS. One could create a static page containing links to different products that make AWS requests with a reference to an XSLT style sheet that maps the raw XML returned by AWS. Another method is to create a dynamic site in which each page is built on demand.

To access AWS you would need to download a developer's kit from Amazon's site and obtain a developer's token. The information within the kit makes it easy to access AWS and the token ties to your e-mail address and is required for all transactions. If you want to earn the referral money then you would also need Amazon's associate ID.

The developer's kit includes documentation on how to make calls to AWS and information about XML, XSLT style-sheets, DTD, XSD and SOAP WSDL. It covers Amazon's terminology that includes Amazon specific terms and keywords, common product modes, constraints, XML element names and details, parameter types, search types, response parameter, etc.

This information is useful in building applications using AWS. But this still provides the raw information and does not include any tutorial. For that one may need to go elsewhere. Many developers have written articles explaining how to go about interfacing with AWS. For example, one could use PHP and XSLT transformation to build dynamic interface to AWS. One could also use PHP and SOAP to build a similar website.

Web services are the new "in thing." They are expanding the ways businesses can communicate and share information with their other partners. Amazon Web Services has opened up new revenue opportunities for both Amazon and the websites that are using it. Even though it is not the first one to embrace Web services, AWS is creative enough for Amazon to maintain its preeminent position among the online stores.

Strategic and results-oriented, Sunil is an entrepreneurial consultant who founded a B2B ASP for the Building and Construction Industry. He is the CEO of Cerebral Works Inc., a strategic management and technology solutions firm. He publishes a business and marketing planning  e-newsletter. An avid mountain climber and runner, Sunil has climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and various peaks in the Himalayas and finished the Detroit Marathon. He holds an MBA degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a BS in Electronics and an MS in Mathematics from the BITS, Pilani, India. He can be reached at (703) 395-9812 and at [email protected].