I am subscribed to the Amazon Hip Hop Music RSS feed which provides information about available hip hop CDs on sale at Amazon. I was just thinking that it'd be really cool if once a CD I liked showed up in my RSS feed I could just click a [Buy This] button and initiate the process of purchasing the CD. Combining this with Amazon's one click shopping it's conceivable that this could be done in a single click.

At the minimum to implement something like this you'd need an annotation in the RSS feed that contained the end point for the aggregator to submit the purchase information securely and a specified format for what the submitted purchase information should look like. In the case of Amazon, it might just be a cookie while for others it might be the all the required information like credit card number and shipping address.

Now that would definitely be cool. A subscription to a list of things I might be interested in buying and the ability to buy one of them when something caught my eye.   

 


 

Thursday, 01 April 2004 21:22:52 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Oh, I definitely love the idea. I have my RSS Bandit at home (work and home editions have different feeds going) getting the computer and peripherals listings going and have been tempted more than once to whip out the Visa..

On second though, I suppose it's a good thing your idea hasn't been implemented!
Shawn
Thursday, 01 April 2004 23:51:47 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
It turns out that with a custom XSL instead of Amazon's default, you can get pretty close, see my entry at
http://www.eighty-twenty.net/blog/urn:www-eighty-twenty-net:1104.html. One of these days, I need to get around to implementing trackback!
Friday, 02 April 2004 05:09:50 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
***************************************************
At the minimum to implement something like this you'd need an annotation in the RSS feed that contained the end point for the aggregator to submit the purchase information securely and a specified format for what the submitted purchase information should look like.
****************************************************

Why couldn't this just be done by Amazon.com adding a link in the RSS description element? Amazon.com could have their description add an anchor tag with a link to their one-click shopping page passing along your user ID and the ASIN of the CD you wanted to buy. The page would prompt you for your password, and then take you through the payment process...???

I guess I'm missing why this would require any additional RSS annotation.
Friday, 02 April 2004 05:11:39 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Dare, just an FYI, but if I enter a comment with an element (like less than description greater than), I get the standard ASP.NET server error page.
Friday, 02 April 2004 21:35:36 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
That's the kind of creativity I really like Dare.
Saturday, 03 April 2004 19:38:56 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Scott,
Yes, you're right. Amazon could just add a [Buy This] hyperlink in the description of the item. I was thinking more generically of how an architecture for adding eCommerce to RSS would work in general. But you could definitely get away with sites just putting links to the web page where you could purchase the item in the description.
Comments are closed.