Plugin / ScrapeAZon
James R. Hanback, Jr.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
ScrapeAZon serves a very specific requirement. It was primarily developed to enable an Amazon vendor to display Amazon.com customer reviews on a product page that is styled independently of other item and product information that is available by using the Amazon.com API.
If you don’t want to insert an entire Amazon.com product entry into your site, you can use this plugin to simply incorporate Amazon.com customer reviews onto your existing product page.
ScrapeAZon has been rewritten from the ground up to more closely integrate with WordPress. Additionally, this version of the plugin include several new features, such as:
An option to style the plugin output for sites that use a responsive design.
A widget that can be used in place of or in addition to the shortcode.
An exponential backoff mechanism that attempts to mitigate throttling of high-traffic sites by the Amazon API.
An ASIN is an Amazon.com product identification number. ScrapeAZon uses this identifier to download the correct customer reviews that are associated with a product. An ASIN can be assigned by Amazon.com or, in case of a book, the 10-character version of the ISBN.
Yes, as of ScrapeAZon 2.0.1, you can replace the asin parameter in a shortcode with any of the following parameters:
isbn
upc
ean
sku
The isbn parameter enables you to retrieve reviews for a book or an ebook by using an International Standard Book Number (ISBN). For example, you could use an ISBN retrieve reviews for Stephen King’s 11/22/63 by using the following shortcode:
[scrapeazon isbn="9781451627299"]
The upc parameter enables you to retrieve reviews for a product based on that product’s Universal Product Code (UPC).
The ean parameter enables you to retrieve reviews for a product based on that product’s European Article Number (EAN).
The sku parameter enables you to retrieve reviews for a product based that product’s stock keeping unit (SKU).
Amazon’s API requires an affiliate account id in order to correctly process requests and download information about item lookups.
Amazon’s API requires an AWS Access Key ID and an AWS Secret Key in order to correctly process requests and download information about item lookups. You cannot obtain this information unless you sign up for an account.
No. As of this writing, Amazon’s Product Advertising API does not support the use of IAM credentials. Therefore, you must use your root Access Key ID and Secret Key in order to successfully obtain product reviews. If you have already created root credentials and are no longer able to access your Secret Key, you might need to generate a new root key in the Amazon AWS Security Console.
For an unknown reason, the Amazon Product Advertising API returns a 0 at the end of review text. If you have configured review truncation, you won’t see the 0 value at the end of truncated reviews. However, any review that is displayed in its entirety currently also displays a 0 at the end. This is an issue with the API. Therefore, the plugin cannot fix this issue beyond allowing you to truncate reviews.
If you want all ScrapeAZon-retrieved reviews throughout your site to be truncated at a specific character length, you can specify that length on the Settings > ScrapeAZon page. You can override this global setting at the shortcode level by specifying a positive integer value using the truncate parameter. A value of 0 either globally or on the shortcode level causes the API to return the full text of every review.
Yes. Although the reviews summary is on by default, you can disable it by specifying summary="false" in the shortcode.
No. This plugin currently only accesses reviews for products that are available through the Amazon.com Product Advertising API.
Yes. Configure the shortcode’s country parameter with the appropriate two-character country code to change the Amazon site. For example, to retrieve reviews for ISBN 0123456789 from Amazon UK, you could issue the following shortcode:
[scrapeazon asin="0123456789" country="UK"]
The country codes are as follows:
AT: Austria (uses the German site)
AU: Australia
CA: Canada
CN: China
DE: Germany
ES: Spain
FR: France
IN: India
IT: Italy
JP: Japan
UK: United Kingdom
US: United States (default)
You can also globally configure a country code on the ScrapeAZon Settings page instead of specifying one for each shortcode used on your site. If you globally configure a country code and specify a country code in your shortcode, the country code in the shortcode will take precedence.
Similar to most WordPress widgets, first click Appearance > Widgets from the Admin menu. Next, drag the widget named “Amazon Reviews” to the location in which you want it to display. Once you have placed the widget, you must fill in the “ASIN” field with the ASIN of the product that contains the reviews you want to display. You can optionally fill in the Height, Width, and Border fields. You can also retitle the widget if you like. Note that whatever global settings you have configured on the ScrapeAZon Settings pages also apply to the widget. Therefore, if you have selected Responsive mode, the widget will attempt to use a responsive style.
Some common reasons you might see an error or nothing at all are:
Your AWS Access Key ID has not been set or is incorrect.
Your AWS Secret Key has not been set or is incorrect.
Your Amazon.com Associate ID has not been set or is incorrect.
You have not allowed enough time for your keys or IDs to propagate at Amazon.com.
Your AWS Access Key ID and Secret Key are associated with an incorrect Amazon.com Product Advertising API account.
Your AWS Access Key ID and Secret Key are not root keys.
Your site’s HTTP retrieval client was not able to connect to the Amazon API.
Your site has sent too many requests per second to the Amazon Product Advertising API and Amazon has throttled your access.
Your site caches the pages that display reviews for an extended period of time (longer than 24 hours).
Your site’s server date, time, or time zone are not properly configured.
If you know that reviews exist for the product you specified, ensure that the ASIN/ISBN-10 you provided in the shortcode is correct. Also, ensure that you are not viewing a previously cached version of your page that does not contain the shortcode.
There are several ways that you can style the scrapeazon-reviews iframe: by editing your theme’s stylesheet, by adding parameters to each shortcode, or by using the plugin’s built-in responsive style sheet.
To style the iframe in your theme’s stylesheet, add classes named scrapeazon-reviews and scrapeazon-api to your stylesheet, then add the width, height, border, and other parameters you want to style to those classes. For example, copy and paste the following into your stylesheet to make the iframe a 540×540 pixel square with no border:
.scrapeazon-reviews {
width: 540px;
height: 540px;
border: none;
}
.scrapeazon-api {
width: 540px;
}
To style the iframe by using the shortcode, add width, height, and border as parameters to the shortcode. For example, to accomplish the same formatting as above in shortcode format, use the following shortcode:
[scrapeazon asin="" width="540" height="540" border="false"]
Append a percent (%) symbol to the width and height values if you are specifying your those values in percentages rather than pixels. You can optionally append ‘px’ instead of the percent symbol to use pixels. If you specify digits only, ScrapeAZon will default to pixels.
To style the iframe by using the built-in responsive style sheet (if your site has a responsive design/theme), select the “Use Responsive Style” checkbox on the ScrapeAZon Settings page.
Because the iframe content comes from a different source than the iframe itself, the content does not always scale in a responsive way. On very small screens (such as a vertically held iPhone), the iframe itself will scale to the width of the screen in responsive mode. However, the content inside the iframe might need to be scrolled horizontally as well as vertically in order to read it.
If you know how to edit your theme’s CSS, you probably can. However, doing so is not recommended unless you already manually display the disclaimer on your site. As of this writing, Amazon Services requires the disclaimer as part of its Product Advertising API terms.
As of ScrapeAZon 2.2.4, the Settings page now allows you to globally modify the text in the disclaimer.
If you want to use a different font, font size, or otherwise style the disclaimer, add a class named scrape-api to your theme’s CSS file and make the changes within that class. For example, if you’d like the disclaimer to be in 9-point Helvetica and 540 pixels wide, you could add the following class to your CSS:
.scrapeazon-api {
width: 540px;
font-family: Helvetica;
font-size: 9pt;
}
If you want more advanced control over the iframe, you can opt to issue the shortcode with the url="true" parameter. When set to “true,” the url parameter prevents the plugin from displaying the iframe and instead simply returns the Amazon URL that should be included in the iframe’s SRC attribute.
If you choose to issue the shortcode this way, you should do so between an iframe SRC attributes quotation marks in your page or post, as shown in the following example:
Yes. By default, if the Amazon API returns no reviews for your product, ScrapeAZon will display the iframe that contains Amazon’s “Be the first to review this item” page for the product you specified. If you want to prevent the display of that page, issue the shortcode with the noblanks parameter set to true, as shown in the following example:
[scrapeazon isbn="9781451627299" noblanks="true"]
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Ratings
4.4
19 reviews
Rating breakdown
Details Information
Version
2.2.9
First Released
26 Apr, 2009
Total Downloads
31,212
Wordpress Version
3.6 or higher
Tested up to:
5.2.4
Require PHP Version:
-
Tags
Contributors
Languages
The plugin hasn't been transalated in any language other than English.
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