Troubleshooting Your Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS) Application

Diagnosing Problems

We recommend the following processes to diagnose and resolve problems with your ECS-enabled Web sites or applications.

  1. Verify that ECS is running correctly. To do this, simply open a browser window and submit a REST request. This will confirm that the service is available and responding to requests. Normally ECS is available 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.

  2. Verify that your XSL style sheets are valid. To do this, run your requests both with and without the XSL style sheet, to determine if the problem is in the request or in your style sheets.

  3. Check that you are specifying inclusive response groups. When you do not receive the expected information in your ECS response, this is typically because you have specified a response group(s) that does not include the data you want.

  4. Check the structure of your request. Each ECS operation has a programming guide page and a reference page. Double check that you are using parameters correctly.

  5. Try the request on one of the other locales.

  6. If SOAP is not working, try your request with REST through your browser. That will help you determine if the problem lies with your code or your SOAP client or with ECS.

  7. If your application is submitting requests faster than once per second per IP address, you may receive error messages from ECS until you decrease your rate of requests. You may need to consider multi-operation requests to minimize traffic.

  8. Look at the sample applications to see if they are doing similar operations, for hints on what you might be doing wrong.

  9. Try your request with multiple ASINs or keyword/title search strings. The Amazon catalog is extremely large, and sometimes individual products have anomalous data results.

Documentation Resources

The Programming Guide describes how to use the operations, including development notes about specific issues with each operation.

The API Reference guide is a comprehensive reference to parameters and usage.

If you are converting your application from a previous version of ECS, check the Migration Guide for conversion notes.

See the Release Notes for information about known issues.

To find out more about how ECS errors work and how you should handle them, see Handling Error Codes.

Online Resources

If you are still having difficulty after trying the troubleshooting steps below and checking the ECS documentation, you can turn to these resources: