Re: ASIN Clarification

I'm one of those on the other end of the "do it, don't do it" line; I do think these ASINs as ARs add value.  Seller pages, in my experience, have been almost as available across domains as 'real' Amazon product pages.  The 'real' products also aren't always available across all Amazon sites, but I think we all agree they still are useful.

Not to hijack the thread, but while we're talking ASINs, what about removing the "don't use [import] links" idea? 

Reasons why not to keep that rule:

1) I've searched the entire Amazon Web Service documentation, as well as all other Amazon docs I can find.  There is not a single mention of this flag.  It also is totally unavailable outside of the particular page on the particular Amazon domain; it is not data they pass through their ws.

2) We allow users to define a local Amazon site to use anyhow; ...so if we're rewriting Amazon domains for users anyhow, does this really actually end up saving them much in the way of shipping?  Don't most people check against their local Amazon site, if an Amazon link they follow leads to a non-local Amazon site?  We're the only place I've ever seen that pays this flag any attention whatsoever; every other site I've ever seen that linked Amazon just picked whatever the local Amazon to that site was, then linked *everything* to that particular domain.

3) The rules get really vague anyhow; You have to know about .fr vs .de [import] issues.  You have to balance country of release, artist local Amazon site, etc issues.  (I see these debated endlessly, esp by totally confused newer editors, and we have no clear guidelines, so noone ever has a clear answer to these types of debates.)

4) More and more releases don't have a local Amazon where there is no [import].  Australian, Italian, and Korean releases have been the ones I've been running into myself quite often, where there is no non-[import], so all of #3^^ ends up debated, seemingly endlessly.  (Edit debating energy better used for other things, perhaps, like checking new add release edits?)

5) Amazon makes quite clear in all of their AWS documentation that there is a 1:1 UPC:ASIN relationship.  The prior examples of this appearing to not actually be true that some mentioned a year or two ago have become much less common as Amazon has made more consistent their database data between the various sites.  With mp3 and better track data sharing, it's becoming far less common to see the same ASIN with apparently different tracklists at different sites.  (This never actually was true, it was due to shoddy data entry for track lists; track lists used to be textfield/memo data, not track #/track title data, and a lot of it was seller submitted, not Amazon-cleaned data.)

6) Given the 1:1 UPC:ASIN relationship, we can semi-automatically add ASINs.  If there isn't an ASIN present, but there is a UPC, it's quite simple to query Amazon for any matching ASINs.  I wrote a GM script for this a while back, and I think there's at least one other, if not two other, GM scripts that do something quite similar.  Something along these lines could possibly be added in to the template toolkit code...  but this one rule would block it, or at least, make it much more difficult.  Remember, there is no [import] flag data in the ws feed - even Amazon doesn't consider it valuable info worth exporting; so...  why should we?

:)

Brian


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