Note
You will sometimes see in responses another organizing tool called
ProductGroup
. This is an
older concept in Amazon's database design and it has been superseded by browse nodes and
search indices. None of the Product Advertising API operations use
ProductGroup
as an input
parameter
Browse Nodes
Topics
•
Browse Node Properties (p. 33)
•
Browse Nodes and Items (p. 34)
•
Browse Node IDs (p. 35)
•
Browse Nodes and Search Indices (p. 35)
•
Finding Browse Nodes (p. 36)
Amazon uses a hierarchy of nodes to organize its items for sale. Each node represents a collection of
items for sale, such as Harry Potter books, not the items themselves. Product Advertising API calls the
nodes, browse nodes because the customer can browse through the nodes to find the collection of items
that interests them. For example, the customer might be interested in the browse nodes Literature &
Fiction, Medicine, Mystery & Thrillers:, Nonfiction:, or Outdoors & Nature.
Browse nodes are related in a hierarchical structure; each browse node can be a leaf node or a parent
node. A leaf node has no children nodes, a parent node does, as shown in the following figure.
Note
The figure is representational in nature and should not be construed to be the real browse node
hierarchy used by Amazon.
As you can see in this example, the different levels of the hierarchical tree of nodes provides an
organizational principle that is used to catalog and find items. The nodes progress from general to specific.
For example, a top level browse node might be "Shoes." It's child browse nodes might be "Men's Shoes,"
"Women's Shoes," and "Children's Shoes." Child browse nodes are subsets of the parent’s product
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Browse Nodes
