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September 29, 2008
I have spent most of the day today in a hospital with Kim… she had to have a bit of emergency surgery, and had her Gallbladder removed. Most of this post was written in the waiting room…
Yesterday, I wrote a review of the newest plugin for wordpress, WPBans. I can see by the feedback, I was not the only person who felt it fell short of expectations… at least from the perspective of the more desirable advanced features.
The one thing I think we can ALL agree on however is that Casey has taken the first steps in trying to bridge the gap between BANS and WordPress, with a plug and play solution. I want to use this post to build a wish-list of what the perfect affiliate plugin for wordpress would have!
In case anyone thinks this sounds familiar, I wrote a very similar post on the BANS forum on August 21st of this year. From both the developer standpoint, investor standpoint, and of course the affiliate standpoint, the very first thing I want in a plugin for affiliate stores…
1 - Change the Name!
BANS was and still is a great product, but just as “Peak Oil” was reached in the USA in 1978, Peak BANS was reached in the second quarter of this year. Change the name of the product and reinvigorate the market with a new product!
2 - Integrate, or it’s Not a Plugin!
Pretty easy, if we need to enter ANY area other than wp-admin to manage it, its just NOT a plugin!
3 - Limit the Usage License
BANS is great and we all know it! But I think the unlimited license, while great for producing hundreds of stores with a single purchase, allowed the market to get flooded with bad examples of the best way to use it.
4 - Make it Quick and Easy!
This area cannot be stressed enough. There are already several FREE plugins like WordBay and rssBay that allow you to add rows and columns of products to your posts. In addition, there is a paid plugin, phpBay, that allows you to create a store from scratch!
If you make a plugin easy to use (point and click) HARD to get (Limited license) and easily modified for the advanced users, you will have a winner!
If YOU could add to the list of what the perfect affiliate plugin would contain, what would it be? (Think bigger than just eBay)
Mark
56 Responses to “Lets Help Build a Niche Store Plugin!”
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I would build a plugin that incorporates affiliate feeds from multiple networks…not just Ebay and I would make it so you could easily add it via php code or even better a plugin via Wordpress.
I would call it popshops……this could be big….really, really big.
Me personally….I think the tools are already there…we just need to use them.
Wordpress and phpBay is a pretty awesome combination that works well.
Wordpress and popshops is also what appears to be a very stout combination with a lot of potential.
Wordpress and BANS is a good combination too…..it seems to take more work doing it that way and it’s not all that hard to recreate the same thing in half the time using Wordpress and phpBay.
As I gain more experience with this stuff…..I build all my own custom pages in my BANS stores anyways and I don’t typically use categories….which is about the only advantage BANS has over phpBay.
So if you do the math…..at least for me….BANS might be going the way of the dinosaur…especially if I have strong luck out of the gate with popshops.
PS…I am a loser because I didn’t wish you and your wife well……hope everything turns out alright there.
Hope Kim has a speedy recovery-a friend of mine had their gallbladder removed 2 years ago-her life has never been better! Hang in there.
I totally agree with the license and usage issue - the price should be 2 to 3 times as well. Amen.
By the way, hope your wife is doing better. My wife is the core of the family - she holds it all together.
My wife is my brain….without her I think I’d stop and fall over. Just don’t tell her that….she’ll get a big head and use it against me.
She is doing great now… couple Vicoden, a beer or two (I told her it was coke, she didnt know the difference) and she is snoozing well!!
You dont even realize how the small things are taken for granted until they arent here for a few days to help.
Dinner with her - Baked Salmon, Garlic Potatoes, black eyed peas, cornbread. Brownies… anc offee ice cream for dessert!
Dinner tonight - Microwaved hotdogs and chips. (Although she did make brownies yesterday)
Mark
I like the way a-liks works. It would be nice to have a place to put keywords without having create a page and then point a-links to it.
Kinda like a search mod but with a place for meta tags & Description. Maybe generated like caffeinated contents tags.
Know what I’m sayin man
Hope things turn out good for your wife.
Billy G
phpBay. seems a great plugin but it is not cheap at $79 would love to hear from any body that has this set up on there blog-and if they are happy with it or is Popshop a better system to go with-any info would be great
I am extremely happy with phpBay.
It’s simple…it works well….it produces no errors.
79 bucks is a bargain imho.
@ Bill G -
I have a very small and lightweight plugin, similar to aLinks, but you just add “Phrase” + “Link” to it and run with it… it automatically converts all strings to links, within your content (Like aLinks does, but without the little pictures and bloat)
Not exactly what you are talking about… but could probably be converted.
@ John -
i know MANY who have used phpbay well, Bill will likely respond more on this. I have it, but do not use it much.
I also have WordBAY, which is a free script for adding listings to your posts, or full pages, but it is semi-limited to a search phrase in a category.
Mark
Thanks Bill- feel it could be a great tool to build great sites-guess the cost is really small to set up a business-I don’t have a street stall to pay rent on-I do not pay wages to anyone-so a few hundred dollars or more to set up on line business is cheap-The way I see the future is you must have quality sites with great content to keep your visitors stay there interesting and to me this is where word press is king-Any how only my opinion.Thanks again Bill
Cant you do the same thing as phpbay for free using the eBay API ?
I hope Kim is doing well…
@Bill G….sure but it’s a million times faster to use phpBay. The Ebay editor kit is clunky, slow and doesn’t work half the darn time.
phpBay works flawlessly.
Wishing Kim a speedy recovery - My Dad had his gallbladder removed as well earlier this year and he also has never felt better!
My best for your wife’s speedy recovery!! Watch the vicodin and beer though. Hope she is quickly on the mend.
Would like the perfect WP/Bans plugin. I am rather struggling with what I have. Getting ready to move doesn’t help my concentration either. Don’t know about the pricing part. I like cheap.
Yael
for fun put ebay editor kit on my new site - http://myflyfishingstore.net/blog/fishing-gear-on-ebay/ Bill is correct took a lot of messing around and also very basic view-just trying all angles-need to get my blog integrated with bans-something i seem to screw up every time i try-more learning to do-I like bans a lot but am trying to build my own unique stores just using wordpress with good content-feeling that the only way is to build a blog around something one knows about so your content flows from within and then you can creep in your sales products as it seems to me when I look at a site that does not throw selling at me I stay longer-going to join popshop after reading Marks post and video-seems a easy cool product to use- However real life calls and have a dog walking and minding business in Sydney with a mad huge retriever to take for a walk in 10 mins-he takes me for a walk http://www.dogsbfit.com.au a real basic site-however beginning to realise I know so much about dogs that I should do what I preach and make a blog on dog training,food,care etc at least I know what I am talking about-There you go just realised a niche for me-funny how you can mirror image yourself when you start writing a post—sorry to go on so much-Thanks for the great input everybody
Be aware that PHPbay triggers phishing alerts in IE7 unless it is properly configured. It’s a good tool and I like it a lot but it takes me longer to set up a store than BANS and, no, I don’t use BANS categories any more.
Oh and the free version of PHPbay cannot be configured to avoid the ie 7 issues so keep away. Only the paid version works effectively.
As far as the BANS Wordpress Plugin goes. What I want it to do is get rid of the need to develop a seperate BANS template to dovetail in to wordpress.
All the best for your wife Mark. Hope she gets fine after hostpital. Never fun to be there I can tell you…
I am currently in discussion with my programmer about creating a wordpress plugin which will act as like BANS. You don’t need BANS but still an epn account to get it work. I have a plugin in mind which isn’t only related to ebay. It should be like an all-in-one solution with other networks like cj,pjn,amazon etc. as far as they offer some kind of api to use.
Manuel….doesn’t that already exist in Popshops?
My experience is limited with popshops so I may be wrong….my next store is going to be a popshops store….I just have to finish building my current site first.
@Bill: I don’t know exactly what Popshopps does so I can’t tell you if its the same. I will have a look into this shops thing I guess :)
@ Manuel -
Look at this post for Popshops info…
Mark
PHPbay triggers phishing alerts? Since when? I get hundreds of visitors from IE7, and i’ve never EVER heard anyone mention this on the PHPbay forums… more info please!
A.
@ A - Ipod Australia
How old is your iPod site? I assume its a brand new one.. but saw dated posts that wer older than one month.
Whois has no data on my end.
Mark
hey Mark - Tis a freshy with finishing touches being applied and currently being tested.
Will be ‘launched’ soon.
It’s a recovery from the old site that got delisted by google whilst i was STILL BUILDING IT! Fun
Anthony.
@ Anthony - Definitely looks great!!
Shows what can be done with phpBay for sure!
@ Anthony
Really like your ipod site, way cool!
What theme are you using for that & how did you get the different country auctions drop-down, is that a feature of phpbaypro, I’m only using the lite version at the moment for testing?
The only flaw that phpBay really has imho is not the plugin’s fault…..it’s Ebays.
More and more inventory is going into store listings or that new 30 day fixed price auction format which does NOT show up in the feed. You can’t pick it up via a BANS store and you can’t pick these items up with phpBay.
You either need to use one of the horrid looking widgets Ebay provides or build your own search links that will bring up store auctions or 30 day fixed price auctions.
If this trend continues…which I personally expect it to do so, then we need to make sure we are prepared for that.
@ Mark - Thanks!
@ Steve - thats a custom feature of Phpbay pro. You’ll notice that you should get the auctions shown for the country you are from. This is a PHPbay Extension made by one of the great guys in the community.
The theme - is a trademark secret - sorry ;)
A.
Here’s the trademark secret theme.
His has been modded a little bit…..no offense to the poster but it’s a free wordpress theme….not a corporate secret.
http://www.wordpressthemed.com/free-wordpress-theme-wp-corporate-branding/
Bill, you’re a naughty boy.
And nice try, but that’s NOT the theme. Doesn’t even closely resemble it. Got your glasses on? ;)
I’ll point you ALL in the right direction.
Goto http://blogohblog.com and have a look around. If you use the guys theme, give him some $$$
& Yes, i’ve modded it a little.
A.
A.
Like with most free themes…there are variants of many of them. That “corporate” theme has many variations around the free theme world.
It’s not even by the same author, doesn’t have the drop down bar, and has completely different CSS styling. Sorry, but you’re not speaking any sense!
A.
I’m with Bill’s first comment - a plug in that is powerful, yet effective enough to beautifully integrate affiliate feeds from multiple affiliate networks while remaining esthetically seamless…
That’s where the party is at…
Bill,
You said:
“As I gain more experience with this stuff…..I build all my own custom pages in my BANS stores anyways and I don’t typically use categories….which is about the only advantage BANS has over phpBay.”
Does it mean phpBay cannot build custom pages?
No. PhpBay doesn’t build any pages…..Wordpress builds the pages and phpBay pulls the auctions and puts them on the page.
BANS allows you to build a hundred page site in 5 minutes….granted its going to be a garbage site that will probably be deindexed eventually but a lot of people try it.
Using WP and phpBay it takes much longer than that as you build each page by hand. I was doing that anyways with BANS so the page quality would be very high and offer unique content.
Thanks Bill,
It means it’s the other way round… using phpBay, you cannot build pages the category way, you are bound to make them the custom way.
Right?
Yes.
Actually, you can use categories within Phpbay Pro. But we try to avoid that since they keep changing.
The most common method is to define 1 or multiple keywords and then use exclusion keywords to keep out the crap.
BANS vs PHPBay is like ordering a kit home with modifications vs starting from scratch and building the whole thing yourself. Takes more time, but you have much more control.
A.
@ Anthony -
With BANS I actually do something similar… We set the main store category, then go about renaming every page that was created, retitle, re-meta etc.
After you have the mains done… creation of all subs is usually done the same manual way.
Mark
He was referring to building an actual page using a category number like you can with BANS.
phpBay allows you to limit your searches to a specific category number but NOT generate pages on your site using any kind of a category number.
Yeah thats correct - the Category is an exclusion, you still need to define a keyword to search for.
It’s real easy to work without cat numbers, once you work out the exclusion keywords. Once you’ve moved over to the new way of working, you don’t look back at all those people who have to reupdate everytime they change the CATS.
+ the beauty of PHPbay is the geotargetting option, which renders CATS completely void, as they have diff CATS in different countries…
eBay is german for silly.
A.
If phpBay is such an effective WP-eBay tool, what on earth is Mark searching for… and why?
I have a good idea:
TO have configurable/automatically generated 301 redirects when you rename or delete a BANS store page. Otherwise, google gets upset when it has cached the old page.
At the moment, I have to add heaps of stuff to my .htaccess file to achieve this.
P.S. Speedy recovery to Kim
@GB phpBay still limits you to just using Ebay…..alternatives would allow more flexibility to use other programs so your income isn’t limited to one revenue source.
@ ipod market Australia
Here is a copy of message from Wade PHPbay developer.
Hi Mike,
Yes, IE has done that for a long time now. Very frustrating. It see’s the preponderance of ebay links and apparently believes it might be a “phishing” incident. Unfortunately, there’s nothing that can be done about it, as it’s something that IE7 determines.
This is not an issue in the Pro version, when the SEO_URLs features is used. It masks the Ebay links and as such, IE7 just sees the links as normal links.
Kind regards,
Wade
@ Mike - thats interesting. We all use the pro version in the forums, thus don’t experience the problem.
@ Bill - Wade from PHP is currently working on integrating Amazon into the code.
A.
Bill,
I am not getting images in my phpBay listings when I preview them in Wordpress before publishing (I don’t wan’t to publish them without images).
What have I done wrong?
Where exactly do I have to upload the images/ folder. My blog is in .htm and BANS is in .com.
Could you guide me to the right track?
Some things to consider….
Did you edit your .htcaccess file to include the code for the photos? Only need if you do the mod rewrite option.
Did you check the box in the Settings to show auctions with images only?
The images folder should be in the root of the domain.
http://www.mysite.com/images
I have no idea what you mean when you say your blog is in .htm and your BANS is in .com.
Hope that helps.
O my God!
Bill,
I discovered it was my wordpress theme that wouldn’t allow eBAY logo to be set along with the two sort options in its width and hence the Ebay logo image wasn’t showing!LOL
Anyway, thanks for help! The problem is solved.
BTW why aren’t you writing posts in Stormtrooper? The last post dates as back as 28th August, I suppose.
Lazy.
I need to add some more content to that site. I will do it next week though.
I enrolled in the PPC Coach program to see what I can learn about PPC so that has been absorbing my time.
Glad you got your site fixed.
@ Bill -
I would love to know how you are doing on PPC Coach….
I enrolled last Sunday morning and started my first campaign, so far, its actually doing OK!!
Mark
Has anyone tried BayRSS? It’s some what like PHPbay only half the price, displays ebay and amazon, hides the ebay links so you don’t need to worry about nofollow and receiving Google’s wrath for too many outbound affiliate links. I just came from their sit, looks good but I wanted to see if anyone here has used it and what you think of it.
@ Bob -
I have it somewhere… let me dig it up and look into it again. I know I’ve tried it.
Mark
Still searching… but I DO have WordBay, which is freeware…
Mark
I just bought BayRSS plugin yesterday and installed it last night. AND I’M STILL TRYING TO GET IT SET UP TODAY! I’ve never seen a plugin with such a high learning curve. The plugin will do most of the things I need it to do so I’ll keep at it. The biggest problem, no documentation to speak of and the whole program works off of tags you put into the page or post. SO, you would think they would have a doc telling you what the tags are and what they do. Unless you have a good understanding on WP and plugins and allot of patients you might want to take a pass on this one.