Home | About Chris Hope | Contact Chris Hope | Search:

eBay "Internal error to the application" RSS feed error

Posted April 3rd, 2008 in Miscellaneous Postings

As an affiliate of eBay it is possible to do an advanced search on the eBay site and create custom RSS feeds which contain the search data and your affiliate information. On April 1st 2008 eBay have changed from using Commission Junction for their affiliate program to their own system. When testing out generating RSS feeds I got the error message "Internal error to the application" instead of the feed that I was expecting. This post looks at why I got the error and how to fix it.

In you go to the eBay website and do an advanced search, there's an option to provider affiliate tracking information. This is hidden by default as shown in the first screenshot below.

 Simple click the "Show" link and then it will appear as shown below:

When I first tested it with one of my campaign ids (you need to sign up at the eBay Partner Network first and then use/generate a campaign id from there) I entered a campaign id and left the custom id field blank, as shown in the above example, thinking it was maybe an option field.

The seach results generated fine, and so I scrolled down to the bottom of the page where there is a standard RSS icon. Normally you can click on this or copy and paste the URL into whatever application you want to save it to and get the stuff from the results. Whenever you query that address it will always show the most up to date information for your seach query.

Having left the custom id field blank, I got the following XML:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ? >
<eBay>
  <EBayTime>2008-04-01 06:59:32</EBayTime>
  <Errors>
    <Error>
      <Code>10007</Code>
      <ErrorClass>SystemError</ErrorClass>
      <SeverityCode>1</SeverityCode>
      <Severity>SeriousError</Severity>
      <Line>0</Line>
      <Column>0</Column>
      <ShortMessage><![CDATA[ Internal error to the application ]]></ShortMessage>
    </Error>
  </Errors>
</eBay>

The "internal error to the application" error message looked pretty nasty. After some head scratching and a little more testing, I discovered the "Custom ID" field is compulsory and if left blank causes the error above. It's a shame eBay haven't put a better error message in there which would indicate the actual error.

After some testing I worked out that you can put anything in the Custom ID field, i.e. combinations of letters and numbers, and the RSS will generate correctly. I have successfully tested it with numbers, letters and spaces; I'm not sure what other characters you might like to use or what else is acceptable.

The following screenshot shows using "12345" as an example Custom ID.

So, if you are an eBay affiliate moving over from CJ to eBay's new affiliate program, and you have a system in place to get your data from RSS feeds generated from the advanced search page, then be sure to include both a campaign id and custom id to avoid errors.

Comments

blog comments powered by Disqus