Problem with Commission Junction Product Catalog Search Service (REST api)

Question

Having a strange problem with CJ's Product Catalog Search Service. Wondering if anyone else has encountered this?

The search below should return products from two of our affiliates, NewEgg and Overstock. We consistently see the NewEgg results, but the Overstock results only appear intermittently, maybe 30% of the time.

https://product-search.api.cj.com/v2/product-search?website-id=[CJ-WEBSITE-ID]&keywords=Flip+Video+U32120B+8GB&advertiser-ids=joined&currency=USD&manufacturer-name=Flip&records-per-page=10

The API call returns in a timely fashion for each request, so the query is fine and the api seems to be stable. I don't know why the resultset changes though.

Has anyone encountered this behaviour with cj.com web services and, if so, can you suggest a fix/workaround?

Answer 1

It took a while to get an answer from Commission Junction, but here's their reply. Not very useful, but hopefully it helps someone else in the future.

You are doing a general keyword search for all joined advertisers and with this type of search the API will try to pull most relevant products from all advertisers. Although it may not get every advertiser during this search if it times out for # of products and # of API calls. If you want Overstock-specific products you would need to change the advertiser id to overstocks CID.

Unfortunately if you hit the product cap or # of api calls per min cap it is impossible if you have a large # of advertisers to display products. The API was not designed to return all products from all advertisers it was designed for a more specific search for a specific type of product. If you want all of your data from all of your advertisers you really need to apply and use our product catalog exports. The information how to do this is located here http://help.cj.com/faq_archive/Self_Serve_Product_Catalog_Exports_Publisher_FAQ.pdf