Amazon.com RSS / XML feeds
I want Amazon to offer RSS full text feeds for everything imaginable. There should be an RSS feed for each product detail page in multiple flavors so that you can subscribe to price changes, new reviews, availability, used prices etc. There should be an RSS feed for product categories and subcategories with filters supported so that you can get only paperback or wide screen versions if you want. There should be RSS feeds for my product recommendations and new products for me. I want an RSS feed for my artist watch list. If a new book comes out from my favorite authors or artists, I want to know about it first.
There there should be an XML feed for my order updates. If my order ships, I should know about it in my feed too. It would be even cooler to get updates every time my shipment moves forward, so the shipment tracking information should be integrated within this feed. Security will be an issue here. I don’t want Joe Schmoe looking at my order update feed.
Of course there should also be the ability to subscribe to an aggregate feed, personalized just for me. Instead of reading 15 different feeds, I want one feed with exactly the things I want. Of course Amazon should have a nifty config page that would let me set all of this up.
Why do I want XML feeds? What are the alternatives? I can visit the site every once in a while. But that’s so 2002. I’m lazy and I’m a power user. I could get email updates, and yes Amazon does send out nice product recommendations by email based on my purchase history, but I’m limited to a few emails a month, and I can handle a lot more volume in a “pull when I want RSS feed” as opposed to “clutter my inbox with emails, whydoncha”.
It would be nice to have all of these features offered by Amazon rather than depend on a third party to build these using AWS. Why? One click UI widgets on Amazon.com letting me add and remove pages and categories to my aggregate feed on the fly. And the security. Maybe it can be done by a third party anyway, using a Firefox plugin.
There seem to be a more than a few attempts to build RSS feeds for Amazon. I’ve yet to find one that’s close to what I need.
Amazon has a Syndicated Content page that supposedly has RSS feeds for product categories. As far as I’m concerned, it’s broken. It doesn’t update properly with new products, shows the same ones over and over again and the biggest sin: it doesn’t offer a full text feed.
There are other attempts too:
- Lockergnome’s Amazon RSS Feed Generator
- Weblog bookwatch
- Blogtricks
- Simple Syndicated Amazon Price Tracking at Watchcow
… but all of these combined are still not good enough. There should be a easier, more powerful XML feed solution for the geek poweruser.
Posted on January 7th, 2005 under Work • 
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