Ian McAllister's Blog: Amazon

Get it TODAY: Amazon Extends Same-Day Delivery Service To Seattle

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 17:01:55 GMT

Amazon.com is now offering same-day delivery service on some items in the Seattle area. This is cool because it is GOOD FOR CUSTOMERS! For some customers, choosing local express delivery will simply be an added convenience by preventing them from having to pack up their kids in the car and fight traffic to/from some store to get a needed item. For others who have a hard deadline, it will be the difference between getting the item they need or not if they can't find the product available anywhere locally, which is often the case with books and other products I want/need.

If you're signed in and looking at a product eligible for local express delivery early enough in the day you'll see a message like this to the right of the product image on the its detail page:

Check out the official Local Express Delivery page for full details including pricing, but here are the basics:

Local Express Delivery
When you choose Local Express Delivery, items are delivered on same day you place your order. Qualifying orders must be placed before the deadline displayed on the product detail page and shipped to an eligible address. Item eligibility is indicated on the product detail page and during checkout. If the order is placed after the deadline, your order will be delivered the next business day. If this shipping option doesn't appear, the order isn't eligible.
We're working to make this shipping option available to more customers. Currently, only addresses in the New York City, Philadelphia and Seattle areas are eligible for Local Express Delivery.

Same day delivery for orders placed before the deadline displayed on the product detail page.
No weekend delivery; no P.O. boxes or APO/FPO
Items may ship using a variety of methods, both air and ground
Signature upon delivery required for shipments over $400
Eligible for Guaranteed Accelerated Delivery

I'll be glad to see the number of markets served and available products increase as the program expands over time but I think this latest progress is pretty exciting, especially for me since I live in Seattle! This is the kind of thing that makes me proud to work at Amazon, even though I have nothing to do with this program.

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RSS Subscription Links on Amazon Tag Pages

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 18:03:03 GMT

I blogged a few weeks ago about Amazon's support for RSS feeds on tags. That release enabled you to build your own tag-based feed by constructing a url that included a tag and one or more advanced options you could specify including length, your Amazon Associate ID, and a time window threshold (full details here).

Now, getting RSS feeds is even easier. Just go to a Customer Communities (tag) page by putting the tag you are interested into this url: http://www.amazon.com/tag/yourtaghere or navigate to one by clicking on a tag on a product detail page. In the lower-left corner of the page you'll see the RSS Feed subscription link.

The tags area of product detail page on Amazon has also become a lot more useful. In addition to allowing you to tag the product, it also lets you easily 'pile on' to existing tags, search for other tagged products, or see the most popular tags on Amazon right now.

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Tags: Amazon, RSS

RSS web feeds for tags at Amazon.com

Tue, 08 May 2007 05:08:33 GMT

Amazon's Customer Communities team has rolled out much broader support for RSS in the form of tag-based RSS feeds. This new functionality has been soft-launched and you'll start to see those little RSS icons popping up on a variety of pages in the coming weeks. Here's the full scoop, pulled from the RSS help page on Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/gp/tagging/rss-help.html. Take a look, and then drop a comment if there is some other type of content on Amazon that you'd like to be able to get a feed for.

RSS web feeds for tags at Amazon.com

(What are tags?)

What are RSS web feeds?

Often described as "Really Simple Syndication," RSS web feeds are a way to surface content from Amazon.com on other sites. You can also aggregate Amazon.com web feeds directly in a news reader, letting you receive updates in your personal reader without having to visit the site. Subscribing to an RSS web feed is usually as simple as clicking on the link or dragging it to your feed reader of choice.

RSS feeds for tags

On most tag pages you will see an orange icon () and the label "RSS feed". This web feed icon indicates that you can subscribe to and keep track of new products added to the tag or new discussions posted in the community. Ways you can make use of tag RSS feeds:

Subscribe to feeds such as quilting or murder mystery, to learn of new products related to your interests, hobbies, or favorite authors as soon as other customers suggest them
Embed a widget on your own website to automatically show the most popular products for a tag, such aswii games, and earn referral credit through theAssociates program
Create a special tag for your book or movie club and provide a feed of recommendations to your members
Export all your products and tags into another application or create your own web 2.0 mashup

Sample tag-based RSS web feeds

www.amazon.com/rss/tag/blu-ray/new - products tagged blu-ray for the very first time
www.amazon.com/rss/tag/sci-fi/popular - most popular products tagged sci-fi
www.amazon.com/rss/tag/running/recent - products most recently tagged running
www.amazon.com/rss/people/AJM38DLD0P3H8/products - all products tagged by Amazon Earworm
www.amazon.com/rss/people/AJM38DLD0P3H8/products/music for entertaining - products tagged music for entertaining by Amazon Earworm

Advanced options for developers

If you'd like to use these feeds as data sources for other applications, it might be helpful to have some extra control over the content. These options can be appended to the query string of our RSS feed URLs, like amazon.com/rss/tag/blu-ray/new?length=100.

length	(All feeds)	This parameter simply specifies how many items to get. The default for all feeds is 20 items.
threshold	(Recently tagged)	This parameter indicates a threshold for how many times an item must have been tagged in order to appear in the "recent" feed. If the threshold is set to 5, items will not appear in the recency feed until they've been tagged 5 times, and will be bumped up every time they're tagged after that. The default value is 2.

If you would like to discuss additional feeds, features, or parameters which would make it easier for you to use our RSS feeds, let us know! Questions and feedback about tags, RSS, and web services are welcome in the Amazon Mashups Forum.

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Tags: Amazon, RSS