Product Feed Scripts Reviews - ShopWindow

I know I'm more technical than some, but woefully lacking in development skills than most other affiliates. Obviously there are many strategies that affiliates could use to earn revenues such as ppc, email marketing etc. The one I preferred when I first started affiliate marketing was SEO. And boy did I make some handy cash out of it - 5 figures a month (excluding decimal points ;-) )

Most of this revenue was generated from creating massive, keyword-dense sites that focused on particular niches. They worked fantastically well for a good couple of years. Then Mr G got annoyed with them so I had to learn PPC and rely on other forms of residual income I developed (I won't go into them).

So basically for for 18 months or so I did chuff all work, a little blogging and some good amount of PPC at Christmas. Basically I needed a break, time to get my fascination with SEO back again.
But now affiliate SEO has moved on. There's the old tactic of utilising product feeds which have it's obvious pitfalls with cross-site duplications (merchant - affiliate ¹ - affiliate ⁿ) and obviously blogging.

But surely leveraging the both together is a profitable approach? Using a product or industry focused blog deeplinking into product searches on the relevant product is the way forward? This way you get the traffic and regular users to the blog but also have the ability to build up useful pagerank [Brendon] to the feed site which then filters through to the products you've not directly promoted.

This is something I'm going to test on my much neglected DAB Radios site. I've very quickly amended the Affiliate Window ShopWindow script to build a DAB Radio Shop. I know the design is crap and I haven't worked out how to get the right products on the homepage, but it's a start.

But how could it be improved?

1) The above, tinkering with homepage to get the niche products in. If you can specify the left hand nave easily, you should be able to do the same with the "Hot Products". I don't like having to go through and changing a parameter in several different places. If you can specify the homepage in the global.inc script then you should be able to specify other constants.

2) Better commenting within the scripts to say what exactly each part does so we can modify easily.

3) The same could be said of the CSS file - it needs explanation. Without using Firebug for Firefox it would have been a lot more of a nightmare.

4) Quota - it starts off so low. I started some test ppc on it and it ran out a hell of a lot quicker than I thought. An amendment could be that when your quota runs out it emails you.

5) Tracking ID's - We know that you can track particular links with Awin. But they all defult to a ShopWindow tracking id. There should be the opportunity to specify a format such as: [sitename]_[catID]_[prodID] or [sitename]_[searchquery] . Surely something of that nature would have been a whole more useful to affiliates?

6) Back to documentation. There should be an easy way (for those that can't "grep"] to look up a particular function referenced on their forum or in one script and find out where else it's referenced.

7) The ability for users to specify a min/max price - surely it can't be too difficult to categorise?

8) Dividing the products into Brands and features. Surely if a couple of my mates can do this, then the mighty Awin can?

9) Differentiation - the main problem product feed affiliates is making your site different from the others that use the same feed. The ability to "rewrite" set phrases would be good, but obviously there may be the legal implications relating to advertising copy.

Overall, I'm not massively impressed, especially when you compare it to the PageRank10 scipts that I used on the Euro 2008 site for Football Shirts. Here I've managed to use their Kitbag script and include the feeds from two other merchants. I know I've messed up some of the categorisation, but I find this script significantly better than the ShopWindow one.

There are two areas where ShopWindow is better than PageRank 10:

1) New products are automatically added - i.e. it runs itself when you're on holiday or working on other stuff.
2) You don't have to ftp huge csv file - if you've got bandwidth limits it could be a problem.

I'm yet to try DataFeed Manager from John Jupp et al, but I'll be taking a look in due course.

If anyone has got any other scripts they'd like to promote, review then feel free to comment on this post.