First, make sure your parameters have an equal sign ‘=’ and not a dash ‘-‘.
I don’t think that is the problem, but it is important to ensure this when adding them.
Second, there could be a few reasons shortcodes are not working:
- The product is not allowed in the Product Advertising API.(occasional)
- Your theme is overriding shortcodes (uncommon)
- You are adding too many shortcodes on a page and Amazon is throttling the request because of too many requests in a certain amount of time (common)
For the first item on the list – the only way to know is to look at the product cache. If it has an error message in it about the product not being allowed, then you will know that is the cause.
For the second item, this is pretty uncommon, but we have seen themes that completely deactivate all shortcodes except their own – or all. Believe it or not, some developers don’t always understand the way things work and this could be an unintentional thing (or intentional, who knows), but it has happened.
For the third item – this is pretty common. When too many requests are sent to amazon in a short period of time, you risk getting throttled (or blocked) by amazon for a certain amount of time (usually for the remainder of the hour). It may seem like it is just shortcode that are not working, but in reality it could be that the other products are just cached (for an hour) and when you try the shortcodes you are already throttled and any new request is not processed so it looks like it is not working.
Additionally, Amazon can also block the request if you exceed the threshold. The threshold is different from the throttle, as the threshold happens when you exceed the number of requests you are allowed per hour. The error returned is different, but you can also tell when this happens because it will produce odd behavior in when the products are displayed (sometimes they will, sometimes they won’t – depending on when it was last cached and when your limit was reached).
If you would like us to look and see if the requests are producing errors, you can send us an email with your site URL and your debug code (located in the plugin options) to plugins@fischercreativemedia.com. DO NOT POST DEBUG CODE HERE!
Hope at least some of this is helpful.
Regards,
Don
