Amazon: extracting the correct product ID

[cartertrout]

Not sure if this is actually broken or even the observed behavior today but filing it for tracking purposes.

I saw an old post on a forum regarding Amazon products that have multiple options (bundles, or color/size choices). I appears that Amazon may have changed they way their URLs work to update the URL dynamically based on user selections, so this may be a non issue, but we should confirm.

The Post:

_"Amazon products have a unique identifier (called ASIN). When an amazon product has multiple options (bundles, or color/size choices), the ASIN in the URL actually points to a specific combination of that product.

But if you look at a shoe (size 8 in brown), and you then change the size to 10 and color to black, the URL won't change and so the ASIN in the Amazon URL still says size 8 in brown. Example:

http://www.amazon.com/Allen-Edmonds-Fifth-Avenue-Brown/dp/B001TDKZ7U/ref=sr_1_1?s=apparel&ie=UTF8&qid=1417380719&sr=1-1&keywords=allen+edmond+shoes+fifth

B001TDKZ7U actually specifies a specific size and color of the shoe:
string(54) "Allen Edmonds Men's Fifth Avenue Cap Toe,Brown,10 D US"_

Carter: it appears that the product identifier in the URL is related to but different than the ASIN listed in the page (B001TDKZEI in this case). The ASIN remains unchanged even when you specify a different color/size and refresh the page. Perhaps the ASIN is an identifier for the parent and the color/size variants are children?

[Osmose]

This is a more specific instance of the general problem of uniquely-identifying products. You're correct in that we still need to look into how we handle this; #43 is tracking that, so I'm going to close this. Thanks for the issue!