What is "Signature" or "Timestamp" for the Amazon ecommerce web service?

Question

Register for Amazon Web Services.

Then try the following URL:

http://ecs.amazonaws.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService&Operation=ItemLookup&AWSAccessKeyId=YOURKEY

If you have my experience you'll see:

<Error>
  <Code>AWS.MinimumParameterRequirement</Code>
    <Message>
      Your request should have atleast 1 of the following parameters: Signature, Timestamp.
    </Message>
</Error>

What is this trying to tell me? What are "Signature" and "Timestamp" parameters?

This is a n00b problem of some sort, but finding the answer is not obvious. I Googled for "MinimumParameterRequirement". I looked at http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEcommerceService/2007-01-17 and http://s3.amazonaws.com/awsdocs/ECS/20080819/QRC-AAWS-2008-08-19.pdf and http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEcommerceService/2007-01-17/ApiReference/ErrorCodesAndMessages.html.

In fact, even a link to the latest API doc for ecommerce would be nice. Is 2008-08-19 the latest?

Okay, first off the ecommerce API was renamed to the associates API. Here's a link to the latest: developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/… — dfrankow

dfrankow dfrankow · Accepted Answer · 2009-09-18T05:05:15

Well here's the signature parameter: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonFPS/latest/FPSAdvancedGuide/index.html?APPNDX_GeneratingaSignature.html

It's a hash of the other parameters. Strange that they give lots of examples without it and claim that those examples work.

What is "Signature" or "Timestamp" for the Amazon ecommerce web service?

1 Answers