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Can I keep track of my Amazon book rank with a script?

Dave, do you happen to have a script that will pull Amazon.com hourly sales rank data for 1 - N ASINs and save into either a CSV file or a database?

Dave's Answer:

This isn't too hard to create, because Amazon has nicely formed URLs which make identifying a specific page easy, and has well-formed HTML that makes it easy to pull out the specific information.

Let's have a look...

My book Wicked Cool Shell Scripts has an ASIN (Amazon Stock Identification Number) of 1593270127.

Based on that, we can create a URL that has the ASIN embedded within to obtain the page that has information on that particular book:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/
  tg/detail/-/asin/ref=nosim
Click on this link and you'll see, if you add the properly formatted ASIN it takes you to the information page.

That's half the work, right? Now the other half is to figure out how to extract the Amazon Ranking value, and that's surprisingly easy to do:

lynx -dump "$target" | grep -i "Amazon.com Sales Rank"
Where "target" is the URL shown earlier, with the appropriate ASIN. I run this snippet and here's what I see:
     * Amazon.com Sales Rank in [69]Books: #51,988
That's what we want, so all we have to do is cut everything out but the numeric value, and that's easily done by noting that there's a "#" prefacing the value and using cut to split the line at that point.

Here's the full sequence to extract one ranking for one ASIN:

#!/bin/sh

  asin=1593270127
target="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/$asin/ref=nosim"

lynx -dump "$target" | grep -i "Amazon.com Sales Rank" | \
  cut -d# -f2
Run this, and you'll get the current sales rank.

To turn this into a script that loops through a file of ASINs should be straightforward, and to then save the output into a database or, say, comma separated values (CSV) file should be similarly easy.

I hope that gets you on the right track!


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Reader Comments To Date: 2

Brian Culler said, on June 5, 2006 9:50 AM:

Even better, there's already a website that does this: www.rankforest.com. It tracks thousands of amazon sales ranks for products by the hour and lets you see pretty graphs and charts too.

Andrew Krause said, on October 29, 2007 1:26 PM:

I would actually recommend that you use Amazon Web Services. It will allow you to retrieve an XML file with the information you want such as sales rank. This is quicker and you don't have to worry about Amazon changing the format of the page text so that this script would not longer work ...

Starbucks coffee cup I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you, Dave, for all your helpful information by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!











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