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Did you have a hard time getting into the Amazon affiliate program? Last time I saw a post like this it seemed the consensus was that a price comparison site d

by leros 3y ago

Did you have a hard time getting into the Amazon affiliate program? Last time I saw a post like this it seemed the consensus was that a price comparison site didn't have enough content for Amazon to let you use the affiliate program.

generalizations 3y ago
Signing up wasn't that hard - they just want minimum sales per 90 days. I still don't have API access though; figured it was worth just trying this and seeing what happened. It's super unclear what leverage Amazon tries to exert; it might be that they just refuse API access? Guess I'll find out when/if I try to withdraw my winnings.
- leros 3y ago
  Good to know. Thanks for the info. I'm thinking about building my own price comparison site in another niche. How are you scraping the data right now?
  - generalizations 3y ago
    An unholy combination of bash, python and TCL scripts running in async loops on an old computer under my desk :D TCL is actually a great scripting language - it handles text strings as well as bash (and this is all just text), it does file I/O really easily, and it has nested arrays that bash doesn't do. For my purposes, it's a lot cleaner to work with than python. For the scraping itself - I tried wget with useragent strings, and quickly hit 503 blocked errors. After that I gave it the whole nine yards, and threw every trick I could come up with at the problem (considering my last project involved netbooting xen, this was completely outside my field). I honestly would rather not say how I did it though. If anyone from Amazon's bot detection is here, I don't want to give them hints. Edit: I'm collecting similar projects in the sidebar of my site, it'd be fun to add yours when you publish it.
hi_hi 3y ago
Getting in is the easy part :-) This happened to me recently. The crazy thing (to me) is I received the required 3 sales, which I assumed would be the objective validation required. I'm also interested if anyone managed to talk to reasonable human at Amazon. I was only met with automated emails.

by leros 3y ago

generalizations 3y ago

Signing up wasn't that hard - they just want minimum sales per 90 days. I still don't have API access though; figured it was worth just trying this and seeing what happened. It's super unclear what leverage Amazon tries to exert; it might be that they just refuse API access? Guess I'll find out when/if I try to withdraw my winnings.

leros 3y ago
Good to know. Thanks for the info. I'm thinking about building my own price comparison site in another niche. How are you scraping the data right now?
- generalizations 3y ago
  An unholy combination of bash, python and TCL scripts running in async loops on an old computer under my desk :D TCL is actually a great scripting language - it handles text strings as well as bash (and this is all just text), it does file I/O really easily, and it has nested arrays that bash doesn't do. For my purposes, it's a lot cleaner to work with than python. For the scraping itself - I tried wget with useragent strings, and quickly hit 503 blocked errors. After that I gave it the whole nine yards, and threw every trick I could come up with at the problem (considering my last project involved netbooting xen, this was completely outside my field). I honestly would rather not say how I did it though. If anyone from Amazon's bot detection is here, I don't want to give them hints. Edit: I'm collecting similar projects in the sidebar of my site, it'd be fun to add yours when you publish it.

hi_hi 3y ago

Getting in is the easy part :-) This happened to me recently. The crazy thing (to me) is I received the required 3 sales, which I assumed would be the objective validation required. I'm also interested if anyone managed to talk to reasonable human at Amazon. I was only met with automated emails.