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Article:
Making Web Services Work at Amazon
Subject: SOAP Bloat and poor uptime
Date: 2003-12-11 07:48:17
From: Rich Z
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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