Malformed Product Datafeeds Cause Problems
I was coding a bit today with the Shopping.com API and something was messing up my HTML and screwing up my app. After debugging for a while it turns out the description field for a product coming from an Amazon Marketplace merchant’s description was the culprit. Here is the entire description:
<span><img src=”http://www.comfortchannel.com/images/Get_Adobe_Reader.jpg” alt=”Click here to download Adobe Reader 7.0 for faster loading speeds” bor…
Malformed HTML. The whole description was a portion of HTML, without the end “>” bracket.
You’d think:
a) The merchant would fix it in their datafeed.
b) Amazon would strip it out.
c) Shopping.com would strip it out their partner feed.
Wait, Shopping.com doesn’t even strip it out of their own site! Aghhhh!
Maybe Comfort Channel (via Amazon Marketpalce) should try using SingleFeed, or another datafeed optimization product, which I’m sure would reject the feed prior to submission until the issue was corrected.
Soo… Then I tried to write this blog entry via Windows Live Writer and it crashed with an “Unexpected Error.” I clicked OK, but the error wouldn’t go away. Good thing Live Writer is marked as Beta, otherwise I would have been a little upset (sarcasm).
Its been a good day, really.
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Merchantadvantage is Another Great desision for Datafeed management, You get alot more control over your datafeeds(data manipulation, Cool data features) than singlefeed and you can also strip out cetain data like spcific tags for specific sites…save the info and scedule for fututre submissions.. and they also feed to anyone who accepts datafeeds.