New ASA2 Update 1.13 brings keyword search and PA API 5 optimizations

Table of Contents

Keywords Search

With today’s ASA2 Update 1.13.0 all ASA2 users will get another powerful feature: The keyword search. It allows us to display the products from an Amazon search query directly on a page. The search query can be made more precise by using various options. Depending on the search settings, new products can be dynamically displayed on the page without having to add them in the future. This also ensures that the products displayed are available.

Currently there is no frontend for this function. The use of the shortcut [asa2_keywords] should be familiar to all WordPress users and should be easy to use.

Here is a simple example:

[asa2_keywords artist="Coldplay" search_index="Music"]live album[/asa2_keywords]

This shortcode displays live albums of the band Coldplay from the Amazon “Music” section. Of course the template to be used can be customized with the well-known option “tpl”. In the following screenshot tpl=”Flex_1″ was used.

The resulting products can be extensively adjusted. The number of results can be limited with the option “limit”, e.g. limit=”3″. If you only want to display prime products, you can reach the per delivery_flags=”Prime”.

Adjusting prices to the target group

In order to adjust the results to your target groups in the best possible way, the options “max_price” and “min_price” are well suited to include only products from certain price ranges, e.g. Playstation 4 products that cost a maximum of 20 currency units of the respective country:
[asa2_keywords search_index="VideoGames" max_price="2000"]playstation 4[/asa2_keywords]

Filter by Amazon user ratings

It is also exciting that we are allowed to filter by ratings with option min_reviews_rating. For example, the following shortcode excludes headphones rated less than 4 stars and more expensive than 30 currency units:
[asa2_keywords min_reviews_rating="4" max_price="3000"]headphones wireless[/asa2_keywords]

Transferring to the ASA2 Repo

If you would like to store the displayed products for further use in the ASA2 Repo, you can of course do this by activating the keywords option “Store results in Repo“. With the shortcode options “repo_categories” and “repo_tags” new products are even automatically labeled, which simplifies the later use via shortcode [asa2_smart_collection].

All details about the new shortcode can be found on the keywords search documentation page.

PA API 5 optimizations – price ranges

With this update ASA2 gets further optimizations in its PA API 5 support, which will be mandatory from 9 March 2020. PA API 4 will then be switched off!

With version 1.13.0 ASA2 supports price ranges again. These can occur, for example, with clothes for which no size was selected. Then the lowest and highest price will be displayed.

Since this requires a separate API request with PA API 5, this function is not activated in ASA2 by default, but can be activated if required using the option “Advanced / Handle price variations with PA API 5“.

Template improvements and bug fixes

Of course, as always, some of ASA2’s provided templates have been updated and improved, such as “Flex_1” and “Sortable_table_2“.

Concerning bug fixes, one of them should be highlighted, which solves a problem with the use of the ASA2 internal cache, which could lead to not using the correct tracking ID when using tracking ID sets.

The complete list of changes can be found in the changelog.

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Timo

I started working on AmazonSimpleAdmin back in 2007 because I could not find an Amazon plugin for WordPress that met my requirements. After many years of experience and hard work, the complete new ASA 2 Pro was released in early 2016.
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Learn more about me and the story behind ASA in this interview on expertentesten.de (in German).