up vote 10 down vote favorite
1

On this answer my link

"Keysonic Compact Wireless Keyboard" which points to

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Keysonic-Wireless-Keyboard-Integrated-Frequency/dp/B000L10Y5E

appears to be being dynamically replaced by a broken link that points to

http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B000L10Y5E

I have a suspicion that this is cause by my original link pointing to Amazon.co.uk rather than Amazon.com as entering a valid "B...." number from an Amazon.com page does work. For example:

http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B003687WV8

Granted I could try and limit my answers to Amazon.com links, but this is counter-intuitive for me as I always end up being supplied Amazon.co.uk links when searching via Google.

Is there anything that can be done to fix this?

link
feedback

2 Answers

up vote 6 down vote

I work for Amazon.com.

The reason for this is that ASINs (the 'B...' number referred to by the OP) are not technically global - they are tied to a given marketplace (.com, .ca, .co.uk etc). Products can vary from region to region, and may not even be sold in a particular marketplace.

In this case I suspect that the aforementioned Keysonic keyboard is not sold in the US, so when being redirected to the US site, there is of course no product to display.

Note that books are less likely to have this issue because the ASIN in that case always matches the book's ISBN, which tends to be global. It's still not always the case though, particularly in China where you don't tend to get the same availability of foreign books. E.g.

You probably need to add the marketplace in somehow to the redirection link.

link
2  
excellent, thanks for the info from someone in the know! – Jeff Atwood♦ Aug 17 '11 at 11:14
feedback
up vote 4 down vote

Hmm, interesting.

This problem appears to be specific to products and not books. Consider:

and

but for a product, even an international one...

or

... not so much.

link
In case you missed it, there's a nice answer by Gareth. The identifiers used are mostly site specific. – Daniel Beck Jan 23 at 9:35
yes, I commented on his answer.. so I hoped that was.. obvious... – Jeff Atwood♦ Jan 23 at 10:07
feedback

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged