The Top 100 .NET Books—Using Amazon.com’s Web Service for Business Intelligence

Web services provide a powerful tool for marketing managers. Consider a manager at Microsoft Press who is interested in tracking the sales of .NET books. Since Amazon.com is a major bookseller, it has the potential to be a significant source of market data for MS Press and its competitors.

The attached presentation provides an example of the type of analysis a marketing manager could perform based on data from Amazon. The data was obtained using Amazon.com’s web service using the following process:
  • a programmer built a simple Excel Visual Basic for Applications macro to find all books with a certain search string in their title
  • the program returned the list of books, their price, sales rank, availability and publisher
  • the analyst used the macro to retrieve all .NET books as of 3/27/03
  • the analyst developed a categorization scheme for the books based on their titles
  • the analyst used Excel PivotTables to process the data
  • the analyst used Knowledge Management Associates’ Mekko Graphics software to produce the attached PowerPoint presentation