Possible to import items massively?

Yes, that's possible. You might want to have a look at admin/content/amazon_import. You have to select the items one by one, and add categories, but you can add a bunch of books quite easily. However, real bulk imports of, let's say, *all* audio cd of the Amazon category "Rock" are not possible without patching Amazontools.

And keep in mind that the range of supported items is very limited, considering what the Amazon catalogue offers.

Regards, -asb

>> And keep in mind that the range of supported items is very limited, considering what the Amazon catalogue offers.

> What do you mean with your last comment?

Simply that Amazontools do only support a very small subset of the full range of products offered by Amazon - that's books, dvds, and audio-cd, nothing else. Depending on the Amazon store (amazon.com, amazon.de, amazon.co.uk etc.), there is a lot more available (electronics, photo accessories, notebooks, software, ames, toys, computer accessories, clothing, and in the US even food) which is not available through Amazontools' import feature, those items can only be imported one by one by using it's ASIN.

The list of categories to import from in Amazontools are supposed to be expandable, but I've never seen someone succeeding in this - but it should be possible with some additional coding. However, the vanilla Amazontools do _not_ support all items sold by Amazon.

If you're *really* thinking about "massively importing" items via Amazontools, there are yet some other issues to consider: There are lots of bugs in this module which are not fixed for several months (the module appears abandoned since the release of Drupal 5.1). One of these nasty bugs is, that Amazontools will display wrong prices; this bug was confirmed by several users of non-US-users (amazon.de, amazon.co.uk). The displayed prices are usually a lot higher than those at amazon.de oder amazon.co.uk. This might _not_ happen when using amazon.com (which I'm not using).

Another real showstopper is the "update" fuction (admin/content/amazon_import/manage), wchich also is completely broken; it does automatical updates _only_with several hundred imported items; larger sets of imported items (several thousand) will have "stale prices".

Due to *yet another* bug, this can't be fixed by manually clicking on "Refresh prices" for several hundred times - the "Pass count" will be ignored, if you have updated a few thousand prices (it first decreses, then refreshing the items will somtimes stop completely). This bug is especially annoying when you have some thousand items imported (I currently have ~14.000) which are outdated, and have mosty a non valid Amazon ID embedded (*yet another* bug which pasted the string "...tag=AMAZON_SEARCH_AMAZON_ASSOCIATE_TAG..." instead of valid Amazon IDs in the URLs; the "Manage" tab was added to fix this, but then occured the bug described before, which prevents the URLs and prices from becoming corrected).

I just wanted make this short notice before you consider doing real massive imports by using Amazontools; you might end up with a bunch of outdated prices which will never be updated. I invested a lot of time in selecting and importing relevant items from Amazon's catalogue which was a complete waste of time - first, some thousand of these items don't inlude a valid Amazon ID; second, the prices are bogus, so nobody will buy the (much to highly priced) items.

Regards, -asb

DO you have an idea oh how much work it would need to fix this module, I might be interested in helping to sponsor the update...

Patchak