Anybody know how to point straight to the merchant, skipping the product info page?

Hi Harvey,

To make the links on the search results page go straight to the merchant, you need to make the change in search.php. Look for the following code (starting at Line 141):

You can change that simply to:

(you don't need the IF statement anymore because whether or not you are using search engine friendly URLs is irrelevant if you are going off-site!)

That should do the trick...

Cheers,
David.

Worked like a dream.

Best script support in the world, although everything seems to have been already thought of!

Hello David

Further to the question above.

Would it be possible to have both options.

E.g add a purchase link/button?

thanks

Mally

Hi Mally,

Sure - in this case the mod would have to go in html/searchresults.php. Look for the following code on line 29:

...and change this as follows to add a "Visit Store" (or whatever you want to call it) link below the "More Information" link...

Cheers,
David.

Hey, any chance we can add the visit store to the browse merchants list? As the tapestry_buyURL($product) just points to /jump?id= with no ID number.

Cheers, Steven

Hi Steven,

As it stands, there is no direct to merchant link in the database - all links are "product" links, and therefore only in the result set when querying products. tapestry_buyURL() then creates a jump link pointing to the id of the product record.

There are various options for doing this. One involves maintaining a list of non-product related merchant affiliate links that can then be used on the merchant page; or alternatively; would selecting a product at random from that merchant, and then re-directing to that page on the merchant site be suitable?

Cheers,
David.

Thanks David, I think maintaining a list of non-product related merchant affiliate links that can then be used on the merchant page would be best. How would I do this?

Cheers, Steven

Hi Steven,

The easiest way to do this; without the need to create new database tables and associated management tools is to create a new version of html/atoz.php that is used specifically for the merchant index.

To do this, first make a copy of html/atoz.php and call it, for example, html/merchantatoz.html.

In the new file, right at the top, add the following PHP to create a list of direct to merchant affiliate links for some/all of your merchants:

And then to make use of these links, look for the following existing code (line 43 of the distribution):

...and replace this with:

Finally, to make the merchant index use the new version of atoz.php, modify merchants.php, and replace the following code (line 39):

...with:

Cheers,
David.

Hey David,

this code didn't work, I think I caught you out ;-)

So I replaced the last line of this code with

I called $visitStore, which your code was missing. Does this look ok to you. Seems to work fine.

Thanks, Steven

Just thought David,

is there a way of doing this so the urls will be masked and go through jump.php as usual? Cheers

Hi Steve,

Sorry - i've corrected the code above.

Regarding altering this so that it uses jump.php - sure that's possible - it would just require you to maintain two corresponding look-up tables in the two files. To do this, in place of the first array, use:

...and then replace the following line:

...with this:

...so that we're passing an "mid" parameter to jump.php.

Finally, at the top of jump.php, add this code to check for the mid parameter and redirect if it is set:

(where 1,2 etc, correspond to Merchant A, Merchant B etc, in merchantatoz.php)

Cheers,
David.

Hey David the above code gives the following errors:

: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/stev7879/public_html/includes/database.php on line 21

Warning: mysql_num_rows(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /includes/database.php on line 26

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /jump.php:10) in /jump.php on line 45

But after doing this i've realised theres alot of admin involved with the amount of merchants I have. Can you tell me how to place visit store links on the browse category page, which select a randon product url from the feed, and goes through jump.php.

Cheers!

Hi Steve,

Sure - firstly - the error in jump.php is caused by PHP beginning the output at the point between the 2 blocks of PHP. With this new version, remove the code added above, and look for the following code on line 2 of jump.php:

...and add the following code immediate after:

This code will check for a "merchant" parameter (which we can pass through from anywhere) and then select a random product from that merchant and jump to that URL:

Now, to add a "Visit Store" link to the merchant index (the category index page doesn't select merchant information from the database as it uses a summary query); you will need to create a copy of html/atoz.php and call it, for example, atozmerchants.php. Then, in the new file, look for the following code on line 43:

...and replace this with:

Finally, in merchants.php, look for the following code on line 39:

...and replace this with:

Cheers,
David.

Thanks, that works great. An error appeared at first so I changed


header("Location:$rows[0]["buy_url"]);