If you are having problems with it these are the things to check.

Firstly, are you getting any error message at all? You should make sure that you have the 'Show Error Messages' parameter set to 'yes' as this will help.

Error contacting Amazon Server

If you get an error message saying 'Error contacting Amazon Server' then you are not getting any response from the Amazon Server. In that case:-

• You should check that you have correctly set up your Amazon Web Services Access Key and your Amazon Web Services Private (Secret) Key, you get these by signing up for an account at http://aws.amazon.com/ . Without these it will not work. See this related article for further information on how to obtain an Amazon Access Key Id and Secret (Private) Key.
• If you believe you have got these correct then you need to check if your PHP configuration supports cURL.
• If not, then you will need to change the 'requestmethod' parameter to 'filegetcontents' and change the PHP configuration allow_url_fopen option to 'on'.

Usually you can turn this on by putting a text file called php.ini (or sometimes php5.ini) in the root folder of your site, which contains the line

allow_url_fopen = 1

If that doesn't work then you might need to contact your hosts to ask how to turn it on, but usually this will work.

Any Other Error Message

Any other error message will be a response from the Amazon server. If you are getting any sort of response from the Amazon server then the problem is with the keywords that you are trying to use, they are probably too specific. The Amazon server will return results only if it can find a product that matches ALL keywords that you use. If you use too many then it probably will not find a matching product, so use fewer.

A good strategy is to start off with some very general search terms that you know should return results for example 'silk', 'scarf'. If you don't get any response then you know that there is something wrong with your setup. If you do get a result you know that the plugin is working and you can start refining your search terms.

The plugin makes things a bit easier by only using the first two metatags that you supply (you can change this in the plugin parameters), so that additional ones can be anything that you like. If you want the results to return a specific product a good trick can be to use the product ASIN or ISBN as one of the first two tags - you can find this on the Amazon product page.