Zac,
I am in App Dev working on an Intranet, and www.FinishLine.com is handled by
E-Commerce Department (and out sourced). It costs us to do anything to our
E-Commerce site. I brought up the fact that all the dead links coming from
AOL will have an affiliate ID; we should be able to get a report based on
that. But, no. Not enough resources to make this happen. So I suggested that
I could put together a quick application to generate a report like the
Director of E-Commerce wants (and e-mail it to him). He was impressed. This
application will help the credibility of CF in our environment. I don't have
access to the log files. I strongly agree that the log files are the best
place to go, they would tell us the pages that are bad, and how many hits
they are receiving for those bad products.
Dick,
A dead link looks like
http://www.finishline.com/productDisplay.asp?catid=0&deptid=0&VendStyle=0315
7CI&ColorID=WHT&AffilID=AOL499 .
The links are dead because the site only displays "In Stock" items. Again, I
had nothing to do with this, and have no way to change it.
The above link is an example of a link supplied by us to AOL, linking to our
site.
The product pages are DB generated, dynamically. It is a timing problem, our
site is always updated to "In Stock" levels, and AOL's site is updated at
most every 24 hours. AOL has dictated that an update will take 24 hours. In
actuality, it might take around ten hours.
Per my suggestion, we are looking into if we can send AOL a trickle (every
so often) file of our "out of stock" items that were in the feed they are
using (in order for them to delete them). We are also looking into
anticipating what links will be dead by the end of the life cycle for the
AOL feed (based on inventory levels and product demand) so we can just not
include those in the AOL feed.
Not to be too hard, because I know I need help and understanding (I'm the
only CF developer in a VB 6 environment) - all these remedies are well and
good, but he wants to know how big of a problem this is before he decides
what to do. I told him I could help. I've got a solution that will work in
our current situation, but is there a better way?
Thanks,
Paul
-----Original Message-----
From: Dick Applebaum [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2001 4:38 PM
To: CF-Talk
Subject: RE: Looping 600 CFHTTP requests - Performance
Paul
I understand better, but still not completely.
Why are the links dead... do you delete the product page when an item
goes out of stock.
As I understand it, these are links from AOL to to your pages,
furnished by you.
Therefore you have control over whether a link is dead... you make it
dead independent of what AOL does.
I also assume that the product pages are dynamically-generated from a db.
Sounds like a timing problem... your update cycle is different than AOL's
Here's what i would do:
1) Determine, by fiat or agreement, a reasonable maximum amount of
time that AOL
will take to update their site after you provide a feed. This is
AOL's cycle.
2) Instead of deleting product pages at your site, retain them in an out of
stock condition for 2 AOL cycles (or longer, for that matter).
3) Put something in your feed so that you will know which feed is being used
by AOL to link to your site
4) When you get the first hit from feed n, schedule tasks to:
delete pages for feed n-1 that are out of stock
generate a feed n+1 that includes all changed since feed n
if a customer follows a link from AOL to an out of stock item, this
means that AOl' In Stock flag is outdated, You can detect this and
mark this item for the next feed.
I don't think it should upset the customer if he discovers a product
is out f stock... much better than a dead link, though.
Now, if AOL objects to the fact that these outdated flags are causing
a customer to arrive at a product page on your site only to find
that there are none left, there are several things you can do.
The simplest is to make available to AOL the product flags,updated on
a regular basis (every 5 minutes). This could take many forms, but
for a small amount of products:
a list of product SKUs
a list of flags
for a larger number of products a simple variable contain ones and
zeros (ala a bit map) for the flags. these would be in a
predetermined SKU sequence and the SKU's would need to be furnished
only once.
Almost seems more trouble than it is worth, though.
If yoy have a lot if really hot sellers, I imagine that the AOL
affiliate dosn't generate much business... always a day late....."No,
the big sale was *yesterday*".
HTH
Dick
At 1:08 PM -0500 5/22/01, Paul Sizemore wrote:
>The feed to our affiliate includes:
> a URL to the product page on our site
> A url to an image on our site
> A whole lot of other info (price, sku, ...)
> A flag for "IN STOCK"
>The hottest items will sell out first, so items in this table change often.
>
>Our affiliate (AOL):
> Displays our products like
>http://shopping.search.aol.com/aolc/search?aps_terms=shoes&aps_referrer=TB&;
a
>ps_category=ALL
> When link to buy is followed, the product
page
>from our site is framed by AOL
> They update once a day, but it can take up
to
>24 hours once a feed reaches them to "go live" on their site.
>
>Unfortunately, AOL can not update as fast as our Finishline.com site, so
AOL
>will have dead links. We want to be able to track the number of dead links
>to find out if we have a major or minor problem.
>
>What would be the most efficient way to do this?
>
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