paulstuttard

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.

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,

The plugin does allow you to do a search and display the results as a wishlist, however it is very AWS request intensive. Its a bit backdoor’y so the arguments are difficult to remember:

[amazon s_index=All&s_title=android phone&s_page=1&template=wishlist]

Paul

If the plugin encounters any error trying to retrieve the product info, then it sets found to 0, e.g. due to the “Too many requests” type error.

Paul

Amazon have significantly reduced the rate at which the plugin can call the Amazon Web Service, which results in the error you are showing.

Enabling the cache within the plugin should help reduce this problem, or it might be there is a bug in the plugin that causes it to cache the ‘failed’ result, so it always displays no data. Try ‘Flushing’ the cache on the settings page to see if any of the links can be refreshed.

Paul

The plugin should localise all links correctly, assuming your IP address is correctly located by https://www.ip2nation.com.

Some people have reported problems when using ‘Cloudflare’, but a workaround was put into the plugin to address this.

Is your ‘default’ locale Germany or Spain?

Paul

• This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by paulstuttard.

Hi,

I’m running the plugin on a WordPress 5.1 site with no issues. Although the plugin is not compatible with the Gutenburg editor, it should still display the links when the site is viewed.

Amazon have severely reduced the rate at which the plugin can call the Amazon Web Service, it could be this is causing links to not appear? Enabling the plugins cache facility should help with this issue.

Paul

Hi,

Yes, Amazon have some pretty low quotas on the AWS service, if you exceed them then it will block further requests for a while. The cache will definitely help with this.

The plugin should only make one call per link/product, so if you have a lot of products on one page then it may struggle. The cache is also important, else every visitor to the site will cause a request to be made.

Paul

• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by paulstuttard.

Hi,

If you want you could try editing one of the plugin files to change the requests to use https?

In the file:

wp-content/plugins/amazon-link/include/awsRequest.php

Line 70 contains:

   $request = "https://".$host.$uri."?".$canonicalized_query."&Signature=".$signature;

Simply change the http to https.

Paul

Hi,

Sorry things aren’t working properly, that error is generated by the plugin when it does not get the expected response from Amazon’s servers.

I have quickly hacked together a plugin which will use the amazon-link plugin to do a request and output the raw result from the server to your WordPress User Profile page.

You can download the plugin from here:
amazon-link-test.php

This might give you some clues, try doing it with localisation turned on and turned off.

Paul

Hi,

Sorry for slow reply.

That is the correct syntax to do what you want, I just tried it and it did work…

However I did discover that some filter (wptexturize https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Function_Reference/wptexturize) turned the ‘x’ (\u0078) character in my URL to a ‘×’ (\u00d7).

Paul

• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by paulstuttard.

Cool,

Glad you got it working.

Paul

Hi,

The standard shortcode is not powerful enough for the plugin’s arguments. Try putting the following in your template:

<?php
if (function_exists('amazon_shortcode')) echo amazon_shortcode("asin=1234567890&template=image");
?>

Replace the bit between the “s with the shortcode arguments.

Paul

• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by paulstuttard.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by paulstuttard.

Unfortunately the AWS service does not provide the shipping costs, so it is impossible for the plugin to determine.

Paul

I don’t know, when you did the phpinfo print out, were there any $_SERVER items that had your correct IP address in?

If there is then I could update the plugin to check those first.

Paul