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Article:
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Making Web Services Work at Amazon
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| Subject: |
SOAP Bloat and poor uptime |
| Date: |
2003-12-11 07:48:17 |
| From: |
Rich Z |
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I've mainly used the Amazon merchant platform and I can honestly say that it's the biggest piece of junk I've ever seen. I will admit that the thought and design that went into the merchant side is really amazing, but it just doesn't work.
The merchant platform allows me as a merchant to post my products/prices/inventory/images etc., to the amazon site on a daily basis via XML/SOAP. It also enables me to get orders on their system that are placed for my product. But the system is set up to facillitate both very large and very small businesses, which means the system doesn't do a very good job at servicing either. For instance, they don't want or care about UPC info for products, they only want to know the SKU. Well, that's great unless you're talking about something with both sizes and widths (like shoes, pants, etc.) because then the SKU might not be a unique identifier. The UPC always is unique for a product. So, then what happens if another merchant selling completely different product has the same SKU as you? You guessed it, both of your products wind up being garbage on the site.
And since about black friday on this year, their uptime for receiving SOAP requests has been about 50%. Not very stable. SOAP works great except when one side is down. I recognize that all shopping sites experience load at the holidays but how many years have they been doing this? Did they just forget that traffic would be high now?
It drives me nuts that they spend so much time and effort talking about how great their associates program is working, meanwhile all of us high profile merchants that have signed on with them are just blowing in the wind. The whole web services concept seems to be just a toy to them and not a legitimate business process, because they certainly don't treat it as such.
In case you're wondering, I work for a major department store chain that's been featured on the amazon site for about a year now.
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- SOAP Bloat and poor uptime
2005-10-06 22:20:29 Kalbo
[Reply]
Hi,
We are new to Amazon merchant Integration and we are using PHP and/or Perl. Unfortunately, we cannot see any resource that would help us in our integration.
As of now, and after some weeks already, we are still trying to find a way to connect to the SOAP server (merchant) of Amazon.
We tried using NuSOAP and PEAR::Soap in PHP, and tried as well SOAP::Lite and HTTP::POST in Perl to no avail. There seems to be a deadlock somewhere that we couldn't establish a connection. Btw, we have no problem connecting with unsecure connection (not HTTPS).
Will anyone there could be of help?
Thank you.
Ed Aspra
- SOAP Bloat and poor uptime
2004-04-10 21:20:15 Mike Dierken
[Reply]
I'm sorry that you encountered problems using the Amazon merchants platform.
"For instance, they don't want or care about UPC info for products, they only want to know the SKU".
Actually, Amazon would love to require UPC for as many product types as possible, it is a huge help in distinguishing products apart. It is true that SKU is required, but that's pretty much a given (a SKU is the unique identifier of the product submission by the merchant).
"Well, that's great unless you're talking about something with both sizes and widths (like shoes, pants, etc.) because then the SKU might not be a unique identifier."
In this case, there should be a separate SKU for each variant.
"So, then what happens if another merchant selling completely different product has the same SKU as you? You guessed it, both of your products wind up being garbage on the site."
The SKU should be additionally qualified by which merchant submitted it - collisions should be avoided. If you have a specific situation that you can refer me to, I would appreciate hearing about it.
"In case you're wondering, I work for a major department store chain that's been featured on the amazon site for about a year now."
Tell me which one privately & I'll see what I can do.
"In my opinion, creating/parsing the rather complicated XML messages was the hardest part of the whole implementation."
This is good feedback - have you provided that to Amazon?
- SOAP Bloat and poor uptime
2003-12-16 07:13:04 Trent Minneman
[Reply]
Has the merchant services program with Amazon been worth the effort and headaches? We have just recently been invited to 'the dance' and are in the process of trying to determine what type of ROI we can expect.
- SOAP Bloat and poor uptime
2003-12-23 06:30:50 Rich Z
[Reply]
Well, luckily for us, we had most of the work done already for other sites that we deal with... but sales have been very disappointing...
- SOAP Bloat and poor uptime
2004-02-03 06:06:48 Juan Carlos Gonzalez
[Reply]
Hi guys, our company has just started the merchant integration process with Amazon, we are a microsoft shop using .net framework. It was brought to our attention the Amazon won't support the use of this platform to work with their web services. Do you know of any SOAP product that runs on a MIcrosoft 2000 server that we can use to interact with them?
We are pretty new in the .net enviroment/SOAP functionality.
Thanks
- SOAP Bloat and poor uptime
2004-02-11 21:43:04 David Reynolds
[Reply]
>>Do you know of any SOAP product that runs on a MIcrosoft 2000 server that we can use to interact with them?
WASH from wrinklebrain.com (as Rich Z mentioned above) looks like it might be right for you, providing you can handle the XML generation. I had thought that might be the hard part, but then after looking closer I suspect the real challenge is in tracking submissions and responses, and not dropping _any_ of them... wrinklebrain has both win32 and a linux solution, but if you call them, it sounds like the future of the linux offering isn't that good.
Myself, I'm going to doggedly try to roll my own, but it looks like this will be an unpleasant two months. BTW, I understand that the initial provided soap wrapper perl mod was quite buggy, and I'm underwhelmed that the current one is still dated from the begining of the service rollout (July 2002).
- SOAP Bloat and poor uptime
2004-03-13 10:22:04 Sean Doyle
[Reply]
Building a highly reliable and trustworthy SOAP framework for Amazon is somewhat tricky, and you are correct, tracking the entire process workflow is crucial to success.
The decision to build or buy should factor in, features, time to market, complexity, testing/certification and maintenance going forward. The Amazon platform is evolving, albeit at a measured pace, so if you do choose to build over buy you will need to update it occasionaly to comply with new features and SLAs. Make sure that you factor this in before making your decision.
<saleson>For more information on our WASH product and a demo, feel free to give us a call at WrinkleBrain. </saleson>
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