Sign up for AWS Account

First thing you'll need is an AWS account. Sign up for one.

Create a Root Credentials

Now create credentials for your root user, so that you can verify you are who you say you are when you run the API.

You log into your AWS account, click IAM, and pick your root user. Then you should be able to pick options, you want to enable Access Keys.

This will create an access key for your root account. This is the access key you'll use to access the Amazon Product API.

You don't want to create an access key for a non-root account, you can't use that with the Amazon Product API.

Download Root Credentails

You'll want to download the root credentials, which contains your public and private keys for accessing the API. These will be fed to a Python script that calls the Amazon API.

Sign up for Amazon Associate Account

The Amazon Product API is for people who are building webapps around products, and people who do that are called Amazon Associates. It might be as simple as putting Amazon ads on your blog, or as complex as you building a web app wrapper for an Amazon web store. (Or, whatever.)

Anyway, sign up for your Amazon Associate account.

Get Associate ID/Key

Once you log in to your Amazon Associate account, you should be able to see your Associate ID - it's the first piece of information displayed, in the upper left, and of course has a bunch of different names. It should probably be some variation of your name, plus numbers.

Now you have all the pieces you need.

Using the Amazon Product API from Python

Bottlenose

To get the raw XML returned from Amazon (and be able to parse it yourself with BeautifulSoup or something else), use Bottlenose from Github:

https://github.com/lionheart/bottlenose

Simple API

For a more simple approach that's probably what you're expecting, use the amazon simple product API library from Github:

https://github.com/yoavaviram/python-amazon-simple-product-api

Amazon Product API

From charlesreid1

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