Amazon Adds Web Services to Canada, France

Third-party developers and affiliate sites can finally tap into the product data and information at Amazon.ca and Amazon.fr, officials at the e-commerce giant announced Friday.

Amazon.com launched E-Commerce Services 4.0 (ECS) in October, an offering that gave developer access to the Alexa Web Information Service as well as documentation and code samples to launch affiliate Web sites featuring Amazon.com products.

The Seattle company’s other country-branded sites — amazon.com, amazon.co.jp, amazon.co.uk and amazon.de — have been open to third-party developers since the ECS 4.0 launch. The inclusion of the two country-specific properties lets developers create Web sites catering to a specific country or one that includes all six Amazon.com regions, earning a referral fee for any visitor who purchases Amazon.com products from their site.

Officials say ECS also gives developers easier access to sell their products in any Amazon Marketplace or build an application to sell to other hopeful Amazon.com associates or Marketplace sellers.

The Amazon.com ECS software development kit (SDK) comes with planning guides and documentation, as well as the API references needed to connect the developer’s application to Amazon.com databases.

Jeff Barr, Amazon.com Web services technical evangelist, said there was no technical reason for the delay of the two country-specific sites; it was just a matter of prioritizing needs they garnered from its 80,000-member developer community.

“We really rely a lot on what we hear from our developer audience and so ECS 4.0 was done in direct response to the kinds of things they said they would like it to do and where they wanted to go in the future,” he said. “Once we got those things conquered and supported for [developers], the next piece they said was, ‘we need to support more of the Amazon sites;’ so France and Canada were the next logical things to be done there.”

With the launch of the ECS service on Amazon.com’s French and Canadian sites, developers get:

• Access to amazon.fr and amazon.ca product information and customer
  reviews, pricing details as well as the images that accompany many of them;
  and
• Advanced search capabilities and the Amazon.com shopping cart.

Developers can download the free software here.