Amazon Hacks

Link Directly to Reviews of a Product

With a little URL hacking, you can link directly to any product’s reviews from another web site.

Reviews are one of the most interesting pieces of community information available on Amazon. A positive or negative review rating can have a big impact on an item’s sales. Naturally some people are very interested in this information: publishers, authors, other merchants, or fans of a particular book, DVD, or CD.

Each item’s product detail page shows a handful of reviews, but if there are dozens—or sometimes hundreds—of reviews, most are tucked away on that item’s Customer Reviews page. Once you know the URL format for this page, you can link to it directly with any item’s ASIN. And once you have the URL, you can link directly to the page from another web site.

Keep in mind that Amazon URLs change from time to time, but as of this writing you can simply designate the ASIN in this URL:

http://amazon.com/o/tg/detail/-/insert ASIN/?vi=customer-reviews

There are 10 reviews per page, so if there are more than 10 reviews for the product, you can go directly to other pages by adding page numbers to the URL:

http://amazon.com/o/tg/detail/-/insert ASIN/insert page/?vi=customer-reviews

So, the following URL would take you to the second page of reviews for Google Hacks:

http://amazon.com/o/tg/detail/-/0596004478/2/?vi=customer-reviews

By default the reviews are ranked by date with the newest first. The simplest way to change the order in which they’re returned is ...