Can’t retrieve US info

Have you check your US affiliate account to see if it still okay? Amazon do sometimes disable accounts for arbitrary/spurious reasons.

I can’t think of any other reason why the US would be any worse than any other locale, have you tried using the Amazon Scratchpad, to see if you get any errors?

Paul

Hi Paul

Thanks for the reply. It’s all very odd. Here’s the code:
<span class=”al_found%FOUND%US#”>%LINK_OPEN%US# %LINK_CLOSE% %LINK_OPEN%US# %PRICE%US#%LINK_CLOSE%</span>

Pretty simple, but even on the template preview, it just shows a blank. All of the EU marketplaces return info fine.

So I used the scratchpad and get the error:
Error! RequestThrottled
HTTP Status 503: Service Unavailable
AWS Access Key ID: *****************. You are submitting requests too quickly. Please retry your requests at a slower rate.

However:
1) We’re really not – we are a tiny site. We’re hardly flooding the servers.
2) The EU continues to work.

We have caching etc turned on, so requests should really be a minimum. I wonder if this is because we’ve never driven any sales to the US before?

I’m struggling to work out what how new ‘rates policy’ will actually affect the plugin (Efficiency Guidelines).

I’ve updated the links that the plugin generates to be identical to the ones generated by the API, to see if that helps. If I go to ‘https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/home/reports‘ and select ‘Link Type Performance’ report, I can see that about 50% of sales are through the PA-API.

Amazon have stated that they will _remove_ PA-API access if you do not make any qualifying PA-API sales in the last month.

From the site:

Note that your account will lose access to Product Advertising API if it has not generated referring sales using PA API in the last 30 days.

However further down it states:

You will regain access to Product Advertising API once your account again begins to drive referring sales.

So that suggests any sales, not just PA-API will re-instate API access.

Also not sure if PA API access is a global thing, or per locale. If its per locale then I’m going to start losing access to some locales for testing the plugin.

However that error you are getting seems to suggest it is a throttling issue, not a complete access loss.

There is an experimental ‘extra’ plugin that changes the behaviour of the cache that might work better. You have to enable Plugin Associate IDs in the options to get access to the ‘Extras’ menu, then there is a plugin called ‘Cache Manager’.

Enable this and it uses ‘cron’ to periodically refresh the content of the cache, rather than doing it when a user visits your site. Note when you enable it, it will empty the current records in the cache.

Due to the throttling, you may have to go to each page in your site (that has Amazon links) and refresh it several times to get the cache data populated.

Kind of grasping at straws though, as its not clear why only US links are failing!

The only theory I can suggest is that the throttling only really kicks in when the Server load gets too high, so maybe only the US servers are actually overloaded, so affiliates with low sales get blocked. In the EU the servers never get overloaded, so nobody actually gets throttled???

Paul

• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by paulstuttard.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by paulstuttard.