You can now use geolocation features with our Amazon Shopping Cart (ASC) extension. This article explains how to do this.

How It Works

When a customer visits your site, their IP address is used to look up their country of origin, using the service at http://www.geoplugin.net which includes GeoLite data created by MaxMind, available from http://www.maxmind.com. The Amazon Shopping Cart then uses this information with the data you supply, determine which Amazon site it should draw data from. Once this has been determined, the Amazon country information is stored in a cookie and in the user session, so this only needs to happen once per visit. The ASC extension will automatically show products from the selected country site to that visitor; if they add products to their cart, it will be a cart for the appropriate Amazon country.

All that you need to do is to tell ASC which Amazon country sites visitors should be forwarded to.

Setup

1. First, set up the default Amazon country and amazon affiliates tag (also know as associates id) in the AmazonWS plugin options. This is where customers will see results from by default if there is no other option available for their country.
2. Next, go to the Amazon Shopping Cart component configuration (components->Amazon Shopping Cart->Admin, then click the options button). Change "Use IP to detect country" to "Use geoplugin.net". (We may add more options for additional services in future). Save and Close the options.
3. Now click the "View Countries" menu item in the ASC component. You will see a list of countries, initially unpublished. To set up geolocation for a country, you need to edit it its entry, which you do by clicking on the country name. You will need to enter the Amazon country site you want visitors to see results from, and the affiliates tag (associates id) that you want to use. Note that you will need to sign up as an Amazon affiliate for each country that you want to serve results for. You should normally leave the 2 digit and 3 digit country codes as they are. Change the country status to 'published' and save.
4. Do the same for each country you want to use geolocation for. Note that you can forward visitors from more than one country to the same Amazon site. For example, if you want people in Belgium and Luxembourg (which do not have their own Amazon sites) to see results from Amazon.fr, you can do so using the Belgium and Luxembourg country entries.

Testing

By its nature, it is difficult to test how well the geolocation is working on your site. The only reliable way is look at your site in your own country, then get on a plane and fly to another country, clear all browser cookies and look at it again. Obviously you are not going to do that.

You can try using a web based proxy, to try and see what your site would look like in another country. For example if you are in the UK you can try using a US based proxy. It should show the products correctly. However be aware that the shopping cart will probably not work if you do this. This is not a problem with the cart, it is simply that web proxies can be quite crudely programmed and do not handle form data correctly. A better solution if you can, is to find someone in the country to test it for you.

The Amazon Country Module

We have also created a module called mod_country, which allows you to see what the results will look like in another country. You need to publish the module on your site, then you will see the available Amazon country sites listed in a select box. You must have at least one entry in the countries list to see an Amazon site listed in the select box. Just select a country to see how the products will look from that Amazon site. We think that the module is useful for testing, but also it will be useful for your customers if they want to see products from a different site. The Amazon country module will actually work even if you are not using the geolocation features. For example if you have set up ASC to just show products from a default country site such as Amazon.com, you can still allow customers to select a different site if they prefer.

Troubleshooting

Geolocation is only as accurate as the IP address country data which it uses, which is the GeoLite data created by MaxMind, available from http://www.maxmind.com. It is generally fairly accurate, but is not perfect. There is literally nothing we can do about that, and we accept no responsibility for it if it is wrong.

It is up to you to make sure that the products you want to display actually exist across all the Amazon country sites you want to display results for. For some items such as books and dvds it is a reasonable bet that they will be available across Amazon sites. The ASINs will be the same if they are, so there is no problem with finding them and displaying if they exist.

For more niche products they probably will not exist in more than one Amazon site. This is not a bug with the plugin, and is not something that we can fix. So if you want to sell niche products it is probably worth thinking about whether you really want to use geo-location in such a case; or whether what you really need is a set of country-specific sites with different products.

Additional Notes

Note that you will need to sign up as an Amazon affiliate for each country that you want to serve results for, in order to be credited with any sales on that country site. However you will only need one Amazon developer account, and one set of access credentials for the Amazon Product Advertising API.