Amazon Product Previews – AJAX for Associates

Amazon recently introduced a feature called Product Previews for people who are using their Associates program. It’s pretty cool. Amazon Associates is Amazon’s affiliates system where sites link to Amazon products and banners with a special id in the url which gives the Associate a share of the profits from the sale of the linked products. With Product Previews, links to Amazon can now have rich popups when the links are moused over. The popups contain a product image, a buy now button, review information, etc. Note: you can move the preview window around. Doing that will ‘pin’ it to the page until you hit close.

Basically, the normal link format for Associates hasn’t changed: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/

INSERT_ASIN_HERE/INSERT_ASSOC_ID_HERE. The difference is that you add Javascript to the bottom of the page. So, all your old links to amazon products will automatically be given the Preview treatment.

For instance: Naked Conversations (book), Tron (dvd), Palm TX (pda).

During this beta period, only 50% of visitors to your pages will actually see the Previews – this is so Amazon can see if it’s helping or hurting business.

The code snippet to add the Amazon Product Preview to your site is here: snippet.txt. The official docs are here.