Hi David,
Amazon has recently (in the past few weeks) made quite a few changes to the Advertising API terms of service. This includes reducing the number of API calls allowed per second and per hour, along with an overall change in the number of shipped items in the last 30 days that contributes to the number of allowed calls calculated for an API account. They also changed the minimum requirement to continue to use the API – from 2 sales in the past 180 days to 1 sale every 30.
One other thing we have learned in the past few days is that Amazon also made a change to the Merged/Managed API Keys that are allowed. We were told that in many cases, if you have not migrated your API keys to the Product Advertising API associates portal (as opposed to using the keys from the Security Console), you may have to regenerate a new set of keys.
Unfortunately, we have no control over this. But to try to see if you are one of these accounts, you can look at the response in the Product Cache. If you click on one of the cache lines and expand it, you should see the response from the API. If it says anything about the account being throttled or not valid, then you are most likely in that group.
If so, try creating a new set of key in the Associates Portal area and add them to the plugin settings. Additionally, make sure you are using the cache ahead option in the settings and that your cache time in seconds is high enough (try 2 or 3 hours – which is 7200 or 10800). Then save the settings, clear the product cache and any site cache, and try again to see if the products return.
Warm regards,
Don
Thank you Don, this was most helpful. The problem seems to have been temporary and has gone away now but I have saved your above note for possible future reference.
thanks David
