Amazon button not showing anymore

hi @minikiz
This is becoming a common issue over the past few weeks. The problem is that Amazon recently made a change to the Product Advertising API (PA API) call limitations. At the end of January, they changed several things related to the API calls, including the number of calls per second, per hour/day and eliminated the IP request check (meaning the calls are now counted over all calls made by the account and not per IP address, as before). The latter is a big deal, especially for users who make calls from several sites using the same set of API Keys (as we do).

In addition, the way Amazon calculates the allowed API calls has changed. The new method is based on sales in the past 30 days (shipped dollar value is the basis for this). Long story short, this is causing a lot of users to get throttled because they are making too many requests too quickly because their limits are a lot lower than they used to be. This is most likely the case here. You can verify it by checking the product cache. If you look at an individual cache item and see “Request Throttled” anywhere in the text, then you are being throttled by Amazon.

If nothing changed on my end, why is it now happening?

Well, it can be for various reasons. For sites that have a lot of products, the cache in the plugin usually gathers up all of the ASINs that would be displayed in the resulting page view and do the calls (in groups of 10 – amazon’s per call limit), and cycle through until it had cached all of them and then load the page (or read them from the cached items and then load the page). Since most people could get 2 or 3 calls per second, this was fine for page loads with up to 30 products. The remainder would be caught on the next load.

With the new restrictions, everyone starts with 1 request per second (you get more if your 30 days shipped sales are a lot – up to 10), and most users no longer get more than one because of the different sales threshold. This gets their requests throttled. One other big factor seems to be affecting this as well – once Amazon throttles the requests, if you do too many more requests that get throttled in a short period of time, then you get throttled for a longer period of time (instead of a minute or two). That means ALL requests from that point on are throttled until the limit is cleared and you can try again.

As you can see, this is a big issue for most users. And it is mostly related to Amazon’s changes. In fact, it has happened to us several times now in the past few weeks and we have never had a throttle issue in the entire 9+ years we have been using the API, not once!

What we suggest is this –

• If you have a lot of products, you may need to reduce some.
• If you have the ‘cache ahead’ option turned on in the settings, try turning it off and see if that helps
• Try generating a new set of keys at Amazon and add those to the plugin. This helps in some cases
• Increase your cache time in the settings to be more than an hour (3600 seconds). Try 3 or 4 hours (10800 or 14400), as this will hold the products longer and reduce the need for requests over the course of the day.

Keep in mind that if you have been throttled, you may need to wait up to a few hours for the throttle to be removed. In some cases, if you have exceeded your daily limit, it may take a full day for the throttle to be removed.

Some users have had success contacting Amazon about the throttled status, but most get canned responses – including us. So, sadly, unless Amazon changes their PA API restrictions, we may not be able to do much about it.

Hope this helps at least a little.
Don

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by Don Fischer. Reason: Spelling and clarification

Perfect! Thank you very much for your time and attention ??
I’ve followed your suggestions. Now I have to wait to see if it works. I’ll let you know.
Thanks again!

Same for me. In short text, what I should do to fix it?
For example in this page is just one element, but not showing: https://comprarimpresoras-3d.com/fdm/flashforge-guider-2/

Thanks