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No, the article says right there it uses search results (presumably by scraping). ECS used to be WSDL - real easy to drive from eg. PHP back in the day. I wouldn't want to be the poor sod parsing the retail website HTML (although perhaps the last redesign improved it).

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I'm actually not parsing the HTML at all. Not really. I'm using PhantomJS, which is a headless web browser. Each time I load a page, I inject jQuery and just do a simple JS command like

$('#whatevertheIDisfortheform').submit();

It's the equivalent of opening up your console on each page and interacting with it via jQuery rather than a mouse and keyboard.

So something has parsed the HTML - but at least you didn't have to reinvent that wheel :)

Still, you might want to look at https://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/gp/advertising/api/de... - the Product Advertising API looks like the latest evolution of the E-Commerce Service API and might let you do things like stop the bot from making duplicate similar purchases, or accidentally fulfilling your wishlist.

"Every time I run it, I give it a set budget, say $50. It grabs a random word from the Wordnik API, then runs an Amazon search based on that word."

You're right.

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