What the Heck do All Of These Update Dates Mean?

Posted by Joe Zwack

December 17, 2009

For those of you that have actually played around in the API a bit (if you haven’t I highly encourage you to), you may have noticed that we have a multitude of update dates for various things in the API. I frequently receive questions about what they all mean, how are they different, etc. I’m going to go down the list here, hopefully it clears up some questions and generates some new ones.

activeUpdateDate – This is the last time the ‘active’ status of the product was changed. Basically when it’s turned on or off for BestBuy.com. A product that is inactive is generally unavailable online.

priceUpdateDate – This is fairly straightforward. The one key here is that this is the date the price was changed in the BestBuy.com system which may not be the same day. So if you do an API query for prices updated today, you may see a different total tomorrow when you do the same query for the same day.

inStoreAvailabilityUpdateDate – This date reflects the last change to True/False for availability.

onlineAvailabilityUpdateDate – Same as the inStore version in the context of BestBuy.com.

itemUpdateDate – This is the date that something other than price was updated for the record. This would include all of the aformentioned update dates.

So that’s the rundown of the update dates. One piece of feedback we have heard is that we still need an overall ‘record update date’ that includes price. This one we’ve been hearing for awhile and it’s on a list of things to act upon.

So, what other questions does everyone have? Did this help? What other things would you like explained?

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