Compare International Sales

Find out what products are hot on either side of the pond with Amazon locale-based queries.

Why are some albums more popular in the U.K. than in the U.S.? This hack can’t answer that question, but it can point out what the differences are. It uses two features of AWS requests, sort and locale, to generate parallel lists of bestsellers by artist.

The Code

This ASP code makes two ArtistSearch requests. Both are sorted by sales rank, and the only difference between the two is the setting for the locale. In the first query, locale is left blank, for the default Amazon.com store. The other query sets the locale to uk, searching Amazon.co.uk. Create a file called us_vs_uk.asp with the following code:

<html>
<head>
    <title>International Sales</title>
</head>

<body>
<%
Dim arUSResults(10,4)
Dim arUKResults(10,4)

Sub AmazonTopArtist(artist,locale)
    
' Set Associate ID and Developer Token
AssociatesID = "insert associate tag"
DeveloperToken = "insert developer token"
  
  ' Form the request URL
XMLURL = "http://xml.amazon.com/onca/xml3" & _
       "?t=" & AssociateID & _
       "&dev-t=" & DeveloperToken & _
       "&page=1" & _
       "&f=xml" & _
       "&mode=music" & _
       "&type=lite" & _
       "&sort=+salesrank" & _
       "&ArtistSearch=" & Server.URLEncode(artist)
       If locale = "uk" Then
           XMLURL = XMLURL & "&locale=uk" End If Set xmlhttp = Server.CreateObject("Msxml2.SERVERXMLHTTP") xmlhttp.Open "GET", XMLURL, false xmlhttp.Send(Now) ' Issue the request and wait for the response Set ProductInfo = xmlhttp.ResponseXML ...

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