Hey all
So Amazon.co.uk has this wierd rule where descriptions have to be 2000 characters or less, including any basic HTML formatting. To sort this we just cut off the desciption at 2000 using a business rule, until we had time to rework them all - like you can raise all the USP's etc of a product within 2000 characters?!
Anyway, I digress. I have a description with less that 2000 (its about 1950) but when I preview the Amazon feed, I see that CA has turned all my angle brackets (< and >) in the HTML tags into code.
So: <b>Example</b> comes out as <b>Example</b> (hope that displays OK) which is bloating the character count sugnificantly.
Is there any way around this, other than shortening them all even more to allow for this extra code?
Cheers
Mark
Mark, we are required to encode the strings in order for the feeds to be valid XML. For example, the "<" character is a special character in XML and has to be encoded. On top of this, Amazon actually does their own encoding BEFORE they do the length check. So, even if we were sending flat files to Amazon for your feeds Amazon will still do the encoding on their end anyway. We will catch the item if the HTML-encoded string is longer than 2,000 characters but there are rare cases when Amazon's further encoding will push a 1,990 character string to 2000+ and then Amazon will kick back an error.
So, the short answer is that, yes, we encode the strings and that does count against your allowed 2,000 character limit. I've raised this with Amazon and they are aware it's not ideal but I haven't heard of any plans to change that.
Wes
Hey Wes
Thanks for that. Bummer. I guess its a sign of how descriptions are becoming less and less important...
I can't see anything within business rule syntax etc to see a field as it will be sent to Amazon (so I could export a feed with the encoded descriptions, find the lengths in Excel and them amend to suit?)
I wonder if I can configure dreamweaver to show me the encoded version of the source code, so I can see as I type when I'm running out of characters....
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