Hi,
I'm busy to set up a new site with Price Tapestry, and I would like to have a "top 10" products, where the 10 most clicked (to affiliate) products are shown, but I don't have a clue where to start..
Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance,
Wilco
I suppose top 10 retailers could be done fairly easily using the count in the admin panel?
Not entirely sure what benefit this would have though ;-)
For my statistics on my site, I use awstats. It lets you view the top pages in order of most viewed to least viewed. This may help you start, but I think its written CGI instead of PHP.
multiz,
if its ok with you, can you please share how you integrated the ebay "similar search results" on this page
http://www.zzprices.com/product/Apple-30-GB-iPod-video-Black-5.5-Generation.html
thanks!
Hi Oisin,
I'm planning to incorporate API code (Amazon / eBay etc.) next year to appear on the product pages - it's quite easy to do with their simple REST APIs and Magic Parser (which is part of Price Tapestry).
However there is an outstanding issue which i'm not sure about so feel free anybody to jump in with an opinion....
The problem is; the providers of these APIs are in most cases expecting their API to be used in response to a user enetered query. Now this is fine for use on the search results; but what i'm not sure about is including API results on product pages.
The reason being; when your site gets crawled by a search engine it is going to result in hundreds, possibly thousands of calls to the API in a very short space of time - which might cause them to disable your account!
A safer option may be to have live API results on the search page, but only links on the product page that says "Search on eBay", "Search on Amazon"
Any thoughts?
Cheers,
David.
You could make a cache option, so that they are cached for 1 week..
Hiya,
Thanks for your comments. I have considered using a caching mechanism (it's quite straight forward to do) - however it doesn't remove the problem of the "first crawl" - where I think you are still going to hit the API server thousands of times....
One option would be to only pull in API results if the referrer is search.php (or equivalent); and then perhaps cache the results so that the content is there on a subequent call from a search engine...
Interesting stuff!
David I was unaware that eBay may actually ban my site. I'll have to look into this. There is also another option by using a META tag to tell a SE to visit every 10 days or so--could I put something like that on my product pages?
Hi Michael,
I think the problem is that the SE revisit meta tag would only apply to individual pages - it wouldn't stop a single rapid crawl of thousands of pages in one go...
Cheers,
David.
If anyone still wants to know how to get the XML feeds, they are at:
http://affiliates.ebay.com/tools/rssgenerator/
My 2 pence worth!
I use the Amazon API to provide random products on a few of my sites as a header banner. For example, Free Fruit Juicer Recipes uses the API to display random juicers at the top of the page.
On my latest creation, I have used the eBay API along with Commission Junction to create affiliate tagged auctions. Example: Fixed Price Satellite Navigation Auctions.
From my stats, Google has indexed some of these auctions and near the top of the search results too!
If eBay banned me from using the API because I am getting too many visitors then that is their loss. That's like high street shops turning customers away because they have made too much money today. "Come back tomorrow and try again!"
I know with Google Maps API (another example (!): Bus Lane - Cardiff Buses Contact Details) there is a restriction feature. You are aloud 50,000 (I think - it is there or abouts) map views per day - which they equate to around one every second (ish). Once you exceed this, they simply stop serving maps until the next day.
I would have thought eBay and Amazon would have something similar to prevent certain individuals hogging all the resources.
At the end of the day, I think the best way to implement such a solution is on a search page (example mad? Here's another! [Sorry to unleash Inspector Gadget on the world ;-) ] Inspector Gadget DVD Price Comparison Search). The first two results on this page are Amazon results.
On a product page, people then have somewhere to go - the affiliate links at the bottom. Having an Amazon result on the bottom of the product.php page would confuse visitors and take them back into the price comparison search or over to Amazon. Good if they buy but not so if they don't.
My ideal setup is having Amazon API results on the search page, along with complementary ads (such as Kelkoo on the Inspector Gadget search) and then have a clean product.php page with just a set of links to follow. Imagine a funnel. Lots of choices on the home page, the search page narrows it down and then the product info page narrows the visitor into clicking on a link and hopefully making an purchase.
Hope this helps.
Dave
Hi Wilco,
As it stands, Price Tapestry does not count clicks through to individual products so it is not straight forward to do this. It can certainly be done - but would require an additional field added to the products table, new code in jump.php in order to count individual products and finally a new search SQL module to perform the "top n" search.
Bear with me, and when I get the chance I'll write up (and test) the changes required as I suspect other users may be interested in a similar feature. It can all be documented easily in this thread.
Cheers,
David.