The Amazon (Lack of) Help Desk

The Amazon (Lack of) Help Desk

Don't you just love the images that are available when you search for "Amazon"?

They almost make up for the reality of dealing with the actual Amazon Help Desk.

Look, they have my total sympathy.

Help desks are often the last thing to be put in place to support a software deployment.

And they are typically staffed by interns.

Armed with a handful of standard responses, but no real knowledge of the software they've been charged with supporting.

The Latest Amazon Update

I covered this in https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/phil1944/blog/has-amazon-really-done-this

And that's OK. Amazon is culling its affiliates by getting rid of the "easy" access to images via SiteStripe and forcing affiliates to use the (much) more complex calls to PA-API.

I'm happy to create training on how to do that for other WA members.

And in fact have started to create the video training to do exactly that.

Using the PA-API Calls

But when I tried to document using the PA-API calls so that I could illustrate them in the video training, I ran into an issue.

My calls were exactly as shown in the documentation but returned what appeared to be a totally irrelevant error.

A Google search showed that many others had the same issue. You'd think that would tell the something, wouldn't you?

Amazon's Response

In response, Amazon's "help" desk told me to wait 72 hours and all would be well.

I expressed doubt, but what else could I do?

And, of course, after the 72 hours, the problem persisted.

Still No Resolution

In my Google search, one person suggested that the issue was that you had a zero search capacity unless you'd made at least one sale in the last 30 days. I hope that's not true, as it would be a classic Catch-22 situation.

At tis stage, I've asked the Amazon support desk to escalate my query to someone who might actually know what they're talking about.

A little more politely than that, of course.

I'll keep you posted.