A few of you have been asking about international links (especially Jonah X and Simon, who are in germany and the uk respectively, though I know there’s a lot more of you.)
I’ve just gotten them implemented on the database entries.
They’re not visible from the reading orders (yet?), but any book that has an isbn number now should have four little flags on the page, like this:
International SC:
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I feel like these are pretty self explanatory. Nonetheless, let’s go over em. These are the four main non-Us countries with amazon affiliate programs I can use. There does seem to be possibilities for china, japan, and italy, but I can’t figure them out and I think they won’t actually pay TRO without a bank account in those countries. In any case, these were pretty easy to sign up for (the three EU ones all worked at once.)
There’s the UK, Canada, France, and Germany. Which conveniently covers a good chunk of our international traffic. I hope those links help people in nearby countries as well.
I did have some questions that perhaps you guys could help with. Right now, the “search” structure is the same for each link. They’re generated using the ISBN number, since titles are not reliable internationally.
But while the “books” category links seem to work fine for UK and CA, while it finds the right book, the FR and DE links seem to show error messages. Anyone know how I can fix that? Maybe my links are formatted incorrectly?
Let me know!
While doing this, I figured out a way to get cover images from amazon for any book I that has an isbn number. It’s possible we could use this to have 90% of the marvel books upload with covers.
What I want to figure out, though, is a way to have the default amazon cover replaced if I upload my own cover scan (because a lot of them are low quality or the wrong book.) I’ll get working on that.
I think I’m going to increase the thumbnail size to 75×75 pixels though, since that would match up with amazon’s default thumbs, making it easier to have a mix of both.
That’s so great, thank you Ian!
I tried the little german flag with Jonah Hex: Face Full of Violence. On the amazon-page there’s a report “1401210953 (or what ISBN-number there is) not found. Best results for 1401210953:” and the best results are eventually Jonah Hex: Face Full of Violence.
So, essentially, your flag-idea works out pretty well. This will revolutionize buying comic-books on amazon – I think amazon will have to thank you!
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yeah, it’s weird that it does that. I think it’s because the links I’m using are in this format:
http://www.amazon.de/gp/search?keywords=AUTOISBNHERE&index=books&linkCode=qs&tag=affiliatecodeforcountryhere
It’s the “books” category that seems to be wrong, since I copied the link format from the co.uk one. It still seems to work though – I’m just going to have to check to make sure the clicks are being recorded.
Still, I’d like to figure out the right search format for german and french affiliate links.
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It’s weird that the foreign language Amazon’s don’t link their ISBN’s directly but require a search inside the book description as Jonah X points out. I think it must have something to do with the books not being written in their national tongue; if we had the ISBN for a couple german/french editions we could check that out.
Sorry I couldn’t test it out before you blogged it, I had to go to uni and focus on the real world for a couple of hours. But awesome work and I’ll deff be buying through this now.
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