Bookmarking Apple Store Pages

Recently Glenn had trouble bookmarking a page on store.apple.com:

Somewhere in the interval, Apple added the modem to its regular store as a stand-alone purchase. (There’s no way to link to the item, and Apple’s link on the iMac G5 page simply redirects to the store home page.)

There is a way, but I don’t fault Glenn for not finding it — it’s nonobvious. The trick is to find the product’s part number and then append it to a special url.

You can discover a product’s part number by adding it to your cart and then going to the page that allows you to “edit” your cart. Under “Cart Items”, your product, and its “Part Number” will be listed. It should look something like MA123Z/B.

Once your have the part number, slap it onto the end of this url:

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore?productLearnMore=

In theory you should probably URI encode a part number’s slash, but in reality it doesn’t seem to matter.

Solving Glenn’s predicament, here’s a direct, bookmarkable link to Apple’s new USB modem.

Here’s a movie walking through the creation of the URL (QT7, 1.4MB)

Remember to remove the item from your cart when you’re done!

Update: Dan Kuehling and Paul Schreiber offer bookmarklets for creating those Apple Store urls.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005
12:00 AM