Shopping.com Music and Movies Return Dreadful Results
If I was to ask a random merchant ”Does your site advertise in the Music or Movies section of Shopping.com?” From what I have seen lately, the likely result would be 99% of them telling me “No.”
So here is the scenario… I searched for the most recent Star Wars DVD on Shopping.com. My Search was for “Star Wars Episode III DVD“, which I think is a pretty popular one. The result: Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, is ”No longer available.” Oh really? Well over at Yahoo! Shopping they tell me different. Yahoo! tells me the product is still available and shows me 9 merchants who all have the product in stock.
It doesn’t stop with this one example. Many DVDs are listed “No longer available” and most of the Music section has only one or two Merchants selling a product (mainly Overstock.com).
How does this effect the developers using the Shopping.com API? The Shopping.com API will return no results for a search where a product is “no longer available.” As far as a developer knows, the product doesn’t exist in the Shopping.com database. Developers using the API are left with no option but to report that the users’ search returned no results. The API should be at least be returning the product data without any store offers since this is happening with many DVDs, CDs, and especially with older product models in other categories as well.
To me this is a serious problem for both consumers using the Shopping.com website and developers using the Shopping.com API. I hope the new management is going to do something about this.
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It’s funny I should read this today, as I was attempting to by a CD on SecretPrices.com, a well-known user of the Shopping.com API. My search returned NO RESULTS, just as you pointed out. I couldn’t accept that my search was so “rare”, but now I know the unedrlying issue.