Article:		Making Web Services Work at Amazon
Subject:		SOAP Bloat and poor uptime
Date:		2004-04-10 21:20:15
From:		Mike Dierken
Response to: SOAP Bloat and poor uptime
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?

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