Possibly wrong forum - Amazon affiliate site won't run

I don't know where to turn on the web, or, post at Devshed. This is like some really complicated murder mystery! I have about 70 domains on my own web server. I designed many of the sites, and, some are just Wordpress. I have a guy who pays me $200 a month to manage a bunch of sites. He has a site, now, hosted on Hostgator, that he bought as a pre-made Amazon affiliate site. In other words, it has a shopping cart that displays game consoles but all of that is fed from Amazon. If someone buys something from Amazon, he gets a percentage (or something). I've never had any experience with this sort of thing. Anyway - he never sells anything. Once in a blue moon, he gets an Adsense click. Since he's not making anything (and he's broke), he wanted me to put it on my server (hey - it's basically free). Of course, I said, "No problem.....". So I downloaded the files and tried the thing - and there's some issue with the cart when it's on my server. I presume there's an API key, or something like that, that's not right. Products do not display and it just gets some sort of error. I've called Amazon numerous times over the last year and they don't know a darned thing about any of this stuff - the people on the phones take orders for Kindles, etc......and that's about it. Can anyone even suggest where I might start to get this thing working..... I dunno if this should even be in this forum.

I would start by figuring out what language the site is written in, then figuring out whether it's based on any standard software or whether it's custom. The best place to get help would be from the people that he originally bought the code from.

Thanks - I tried to quote your last sentence but Chrome won't work with the software...that's another story. That's exactly what I've told the guy, for a year: call the dude who sold you this, explain the problem, and see what he knows. I did find an Amazon forum, this morning, and posted this question (I hadn't been able to find one, previously). I posted, hours ago, and still no answers. It's a little thing - and his current hosting is only 10 bucks a month or something - but my buddy keeps bugging me, "Did you figure that out,yet.....etc.?. I believe there's some sort of key that is missing - not sure if it's a standard API thing, but it's apparently that sort of thing. The cart, instead of displaying the products, says this:

"The request signature we calculated does not match the signature you provided. Check your AWS Secret Access Key and signing method. Consult the service documentation for details."

Obviously, I'm just some schmuck running a server and I have no idea what documentation they're talking about - and, no access to any documentation. And Amazon is no help, so far. Man - it's crazy.

Anyway - thanks for the input.

The site, of course, is PHP but with a lot of javascript stuff... I've tried to disassemble the thing to find what it's looking for, but it's just too complicated...

the Amazon AWS site should get you started http://aws.amazon.com/
just scroll down to bottom and look thru the Developer Resources section and browse thru some of their example code..maybe that will help you figure out what Amazon wants in the code and what to tell your "buddy" as to what info he needs to get for you.

Without either looking at the code or knowing exactly what software you're using there's not really a way for someone to tell you how to fix it. Yes, you're right that it's probably some really minor API key that's set incorrectly, but there are a million different places the key could be stored and there's no way for someone to tell you where it is based on the information you have.

If the software is something standard that lots of people use then you can probably find the answer you need. But first you have to know what the software is. If the software is not something standard, then you need a programmer to find the answer for you. That's not the sort of thing free tech support is going to help with (unless it's coming from the company that wrote the software to begin with), and hiring someone to do it is probably going to cost as much as a few years of hosting at hostgator anyway.