What frustrates you about AWS?

[flyingpylon]

Anyone who has spent any time at all with Amazon Web Services has probably run into some of its many limitations. I'm trying to put together my own list of AWS frustrations and realized that due to the traumatic experience of dealing with AWS I must have blocked many of them from memory!

So what frustrates you most about AWS?

Tonight my biggest frustration is that images don't show up for Sporting Goods. This mode has been in beta so long I can't even believe it. I had a workaround that worked for a while, but now it doesn't. All the products say "discontinued" now anyway so who cares... that's another problem I guess.

Another frustration is that the remote cart doesn't really work for marketplace items. Nor can you store multiple marketplace items in a local cart and transfer them to the Amazon cart all at once.

Also, third-party seller information has been missing from the XML results for weeks.

And it's impossible to search on phrases using quotes. Books has "power search" functionality which is useful, but none of the other modes have anything remotely like it.

It's hard to believe that Amazon can call itself the leader in e-commerce and get away with producing such a flakey web service. And what's worse is that they don't even properly support it.

Anyone want to pile on?

[pas]

One word: inconsistency.

Nodes aren't available, others don't have all the data, others change or are dropped.

[GCT13]

flyingpylon, I'm sorry to hear AWS has put you in the trauma ward. Sure, AWS can be inconsistent, flaky, a work in progress, what have you, from time to time.

And yet-

What other ecommerce site has anything that's even close to the scope of AWS?

My advice for a happy AWS experience is to stay as far away from beta modes as possible and try to avoid using the local cart (until its functionality becomes more consistent). It's just not worth putting in the development effort to push the AWS envelope.

- Dan (happy AWS user) ;)

[MarkB]

My frustration is I have had no sales in the last month despite having the same level of traffic...

[Nick]

mark, try adding adsense to your aws sites to capitalize on the traffic.

[MarkB]

There're no ads that fit into my site topic. And I'm more concerned with why the sales have dried up.

I'll probably be culling a number of sites in the near future, anyway.

[incka]

I'm actually quite happy with it, it's the caching software I don't like. The only one I can stand is JPCache.

[chromate]

My biggest frustration with AWS is the way they return stuff that is not stocked anymore. You have to pick them out of the results with code and in some cases, it only leaves you with a couple of items on a single page. So I chose to just leave them in.

Apart from that I've been very happy with AWS.

I also tried building a store around one of the new categories way back. In fact, I think it was sporting goods. It didn't work for me either, so I dropped it and decided to concentrate on one of the others.

[flyingpylon]

I guess many of my frustrations are based on the fact that I'm not simply displaying products from a pre-defined mode such as "Tools", "Books" or whatever. My site is based on a broad topic that has products in many modes, and marketplace items are essential as well. It's a bit of a nightmare trying to provide any kind of consistency to the site across various modes.

[GCT13]

I have wondered why the "Modes" variable is neccessary. It has alway seemed superflous for an individual product or category search. Only place "Modes" makes sense is for some kind of keyword search.

Guess that's just the way Amazon's product catelogy is designed.