Amazon.cn — Joyo, the China version of Amazon.com has been live for a while now, and a few months ago Amazon.cn (China) and Amazon.it (Italy) were added to the associates affiliate program. One of the main driving forces for the associates program is the use of Amazon’s product advertising API. This is what enables sites like NovelRank and thousands of others to access data about products listed on a specific Amazon domain.

While nothing has been officially announced, recent functionality has lead me to believe that Amazon.cn will soon have the product advertising API available. A few months ago, it was not responding at all. A few months later, it was not processing requests properly. Now, it seems to be functioning properly on the simplest of requests: an item lookup by ASIN. Until it is announced, I don’t intend to add the domain to NovelRank for book tracking, however I expect this will be available very soon. There will need to be a few steps to integrate the new domain, however the steps are minor and it will part of the NovelRank domain options within a few hours or days of the release of the Amazon.cn API.

What about Amazon.it (Italy)?

Requests against this fledgling API asks you to provide an already established marketplace: France, United Kingdom, or Germany. My guess is that this behaviour means that Amazon is not interested in making the Amazon.it marketplace unique in the near future, and thus the API will be on the back burner.

Can anyone else use this information?

If Aaron over at SalesRankExpress is able to resolve his current issues with Amazon’s API, I expect that as soon as the API is announced, he will be enabling it as an option in his all-inclusive static requests for information about products on Amazon. I expect that few other websites will be as quick to adapt and include the new domain, but if they are multi-domain now, it won’t take much, so this post acts as a heads-up.

Stay tuned for Amazon.cn to be available for tracking sometime in 2011 (guesstimate)!