Amazon mp3

[Sven Krohlas]

Heya,

Amazons stupidity knows no limits...

Sven Krohlas wrote:
> Mark Fraser wrote:
>> On Saturday 19 Jan 2013 18:46:41 Sven Krohlas wrote:
>>> Mark Fraser wrote:
>>> > I upgraded to Amarok 2.7 today and decided to try out the Amazon mp3 shop.
>>> > I added a track to my cart, clicked on checkout which took me to Amazon's
>>> > website, but then nothing happened and I couldn't download the track.
>>> > 
>>> > Any ideas?
>>> 
>>> which track, which Amazon locale and in which country are you located?
>> 
>> The track was "In a Moment" by Stereophonics, the Amazon locale and my country 
>> are both UK. I have tried other tracks and none of them allow me to download 
>> the track and they're not in the cloud player either.
> 
> bad news: We analyzed the problem and it seems as if Amazon UK does not
> return a valid purchase url anymore. So there is nothing we can do but to
> wait for them to fix it. Which might happen, judging from our experience
> with Amazon so far, sometime between now and never. :-/
> 
> Amazon Germany still works, so I suppose this is indeed a bug and not a
> strange, undocumented API change on their side. We'll see.
> 
> Anyway, thanks a lot for your report. I'm going to keep an eye on the issue.

We have had the following workflow:
1. User sends us product IDs (ASINs) to check out
2. We create a shopping cart using the Amazon API.
3. We extract the cart URL
4. We return the cart URL to the user
5. Amazon checks if the user is allowed to purchase those items
(correct location for the store)

Amazon seems to have moved the check (step 5) into step 2, therefore
all stores escept the German one are broken, as the API server is located
in Germany.

We are searching for a workaround, but that will be hard without adding
more servers or tunneling requests, which would introduce further latencies. :-/