I've been trying to wrap my head around the Aggregation, Leech or FeedApi module and am looking for a drupal guru with an entrepreneurial spirit to help.
I'm building a niche Amazon Associates store, where I connect to Amazon's REST API and create an affiliate store. They have an API based on XML and use a simple tool where you can grab an XML description of items in a search. I believe using the Aggregation Module, you can turn each item into a node and then with the Views module set up an Amazon store page.
If you look at this tool: http://www.awszone.com/scratchpads/aws/ecs.us/ItemSearch.aws it can build the REST query for you based on a browsenode, which is an Amazon parent.
The only other challenge is that you can only retrieve 10 items per second, so a handler would need to loop for each ItemPage.
The feed would work with taxonomy to automatically create a category for each tag (like manufacture) that you want to capture in the XML.
Unfortunately, I'm not technically sophisticated enough to figure this out, and I'd appreciate some help with this project. I have a great idea for an affiliate store based on drupal, but I need some help with this.
There is a project - http://drupal.org/project/amazontools - that has been abandoned, and barely works in drupal 5.