The S.R.E. Web Widget adds a small portion of the power of Sales Rank Express to your own blog or Web site. It will show your visitors the current Amazon sales rank, customer rating, and number of reviews for one or more books, Kindle Books, CDs, DVDs, or anything else, on Amazon.com or any other Amazon site worldwide. Also included is a link to the item’s page on that site, which can include your Amazon Associates ID for commissioned sales. Examples appear here on the right.
If you want to show more than one item, or show the same item in more than one country, just place multiple copies of the widget code on your page and insert different sets of variables. There is no absolute limit to the number of widgets on a page.
To install the widget, click in the text box below and choose “Select All” from your Edit or contextual menu. Then copy and paste this code into the HTML of your blog sidebar or Web page, at whatever point you want the widget to appear. For instance, for Blogger, you would go to your blog’s Design tab, click on “Add a Gadget” in the sidebar, choose the HTML/JavaScript gadget, then paste in the widget code.
Note: If you do not see plain text in the box, you are probably using Internet Explorer. Try again with a better browser, or click here for a text file.
Within the code you’ve pasted, you’ll see placeholders and defaults for several “variables.” Change or replace these with your own data as needed, making sure to leave the surrounding quote marks. Here are notes on each of these variables.
ASIN. The first variable is the Amazon Standard Identification Number, a 10-character code of letters and/or numbers. Every item sold on Amazon has a unique ASIN, and this is what tells the widget what to look up. For a printed book, this will usually be the same as its ISBN in the older, 10-digit format, without hyphens. For a Kindle Book, it will not be an ISBN in any form, even if you assigned one. If you look up your item on Amazon, you’ll find the ASIN or ISBN-10 in the section with the item’s essential data (date, dimensions, sales rank, and so on). It will also be part of the Amazon Web page address as seen at the top of the browser window, where the ASIN will directly follow a slash (/). To ensure accuracy, use cut and paste commands to place it in the widget code.
KINDLE_OFF. For a Kindle Book, change this to “KINDLE_ON”. Otherwise, leave as is. Note that the widget will not work for any free Kindle Book, because Amazon will not supply the sales rank data.
COUNTRYCODE. This is a two-letter code for the country where Amazon is selling and ranking your book. Your choices are
US—United States (Amazon.com)
CA—Canada (Amazon.ca)
UK—United Kingdom (Amazon.co.uk)
FR—France (Amazon.fr)
DE—Germany (Amazon.de)
JP—Japan (Amazon.co.jp)For a Kindle Book, the code must be for a country with a Kindle Store. At this writing, that means “US” or “UK” only—but codes for other countries should work automatically as new Kindle Stores are opened in them.
If you do not insert any country code, you will get “US” by default.
SHOWCOUNTRY_ON. This tells the widget to display the country name. If you don’t want that name to appear, change this to “SHOWCOUNTRY_OFF”.
ASSOCIATESID. The Amazon Associates ID enables you to receive commissions on purchases by visitors following a widget link to Amazon. Place your ID here if you have signed up as an Associate in the country you’ve selected for the widget. (If you use an Associates ID from a different country, you will not receive commissions.) If you have no ID to insert here, just leave the placeholder as is, and the widget will use an ID that helps support Sales Rank Express.