Blocking an undesired item while using the Amazon Store module for Drupal

Date: Fri Nov 05 2010 Affiliate Marketing »»»» Amazon »»»» Drupal Planet
The other day I was contacted by a lawyer about an improper use of their trademark. Unfortunately the improper use stemmed from a product listing controlled by the "Amazon Store" module, and is in data retrieved from amazon.com using their affiliate product web services API. The "Amazon Store" module implements something like the "aStore" feature supported by amazon.com, but hosted on a Drupal site. Because all the data comes direct from amazon.com there is little control over how it is displayed.

The infraction was clear (one company clearly using a term trademarked by another) and I wanted to comply with the request. Unfortunately the Amazon Store module doesn't provide anything like a "black list" to suppress listing an item.

For example it would have been way cool to take the ASIN, put it into a "suppress these items" list, and those items would never appear on the site. There could be many reasons to do this - not just to satisfy trademark infringement requests from lawyers. What if you don't like a particular product?

Fortunately there's a relatively simple way to do this using a different module. Namely, Path Redirect. Install it and add a redirect for the relevant amazon_item page. In my case the path to redirect is: amazon_store/item/B002OFWQ24.