Woot Developer API: Bug Reporting / Discussion

Information Desk
1

This forum topic is dedicated to the reporting and discussion of bugs/oddities encountered when using the Woot Developer API.

I have been using the API for nearly two years and there is a glaring issue I’d like to bring to the attention of the API development team.

It seems that requests to the GetNamedFeed endpoint (https://developer.woot.com/feed/{feedname}) result in responses for entirely different product categories than those specified by the feedname parameter.

A call to https://developer.woot.com/feed/Clearance might result in a response of the form:

{
  "Items": [......],
  "MarketingName": "Electronics",
  "TotalPages": 12
}

An immediate, subsequent call might produce the following:

{
  "Items": [......],
  "MarketingName": "Tools & Garden",
  "TotalPages": 12
}

As such, when requesting products for a given feedname, I must resort to requesting the same resource again and again until the MarketingName aligns with the requested feedname.

Further, I notice that the number of Items contained in the response can vary wildly from call to call, particularly when I supply the feedname All. Responses to that request will sometime yield thousands of Items (which I deem to be correct), while other times there might be only a handful. In this scenario, my workaround has been to evaluate the size of the response to that call in order to guess whether the response does indeed contain the complete set of items.

On a related note, there seems to be a hard limit of ~5000 items, so supplying a feedname of All can not be trusted to return the complete set of products currently for sales on Woot!. When my request for All yields 5000 items, I assume that there are in fact more and fall back to fetching them by individual category name, which I’d be fine with so long as the GetNamedFeed endpoint was generally more reliable.

Fellow consumers of the Woot Developer API have surely encountered this behavior as well, and I just wanted to finally take time to raise the issue and see if it’s something that the API development team is aware of.

To the API development team:

If there is a better place for such issues to be reported and discussed, please let us know. Your work on the API is appreciated and I’d be happy to participate in any discussions you’d care to have.

2

Hello. Thanks for the feedback. I added your feedback to the ongoing ticket open to our developers.

1 Like
3

Thank you for passing this feedback on to the development team.

Has there been any acknowledgment or response?

4

Has there been any progress or updates on this? I’ve also been facing this issue for some time.

Thanks!

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5

No, I’m sorry. It’s on the list but a lower priority than keeping our site running. :frowning:

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6

No worries! I appreciate the reply either way :slight_smile: The last thing anyone wants is for the site to suffer.

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