Archive for January, 2008
If you happen to browse around the forums at Digital Point or other places, you will see lots of questions asking if you can make money from Commission Junction.
Yes, Yes and Yes
There are lots of people that make a pretty decent income, but how would you like to make $709,626.81? IN ONE MONTH?! There very well known Jeremy Schoemaker of Shoemony.com did just that in March 2007.
Here is a screenshot of that, courtesy of S.eriously.com. If you need some inspiration, take a look through the rest of the that site, there are quite few big money earners utilizing different affiliate networks.
I recently wrote about eBay’s CEO leaving and how that might affect you. I opined that I didn’t think it would affect affiliates too much, and according to an article on TechCrunch, it looks like I was correct. The article takes a closer look at the fee structure change and it looks like an according to a quote from the AP,
selling a purse at auction for $25 would have cost the seller $1.91, including 60 cents for listing the item plus eBay’s commission of $1.31. Under the new structure, the seller would pay $2.74, including 55 cents to list the item plus a higher commission of $2.19.
More Commission Is Good!
So while eBay sellers may not be all that happy, it works out quite well for the rest of us. Looks like my timing for getting into the eBay niche store business is a good thing.
I’ve pretty much wrapped up the major features for my niche store builder. I’ve built out the first two layouts and will do a couple more before open testing begins.
Speaking of Layouts
One feature that I decided to build in with regards to layouts is theming. The first set of layouts will have 4-6 themes to choose from. These first themes are basically just color variations on the say layout, but you can see the benefit. By simply changing the CSS file you can create a whole new theme for a given layout. I will also be including the Photoshop PSD files that I used for each theme to make customizing them even easier. If you don’t have Photoshop or some other software that can’t read PSD files, the graphics are exported into PNG format which is also easily customizable. You can thank a beta tester for that request 
Right now the there themes for blue, brown, gray and green. If there are any color requests get them in now!
I’m going to build one or two stores myself before letting the beta testers loose with it. So at the moment I’m targeting next Monday for beta testing. I still have some slots available if you are interested. Let me know before I make an announcement on some forums.
Meg Whitman has announced that she is leaving eBay after ten years of service. What does this mean if you are an eBay affiliate?
Initially not much. According to an interview that Meg Whitman and incoming CEO John Donahoe had on TechCrunch, it seems that they want to focus more on fixed-price items and expanding into other opportunities on the web, such as Facebook.
Lowering Fees
The recent change in fees has also been generating some interest lately. In 2007 eBay did a lot of experimenting with different fee structures in an attempt to get more people to sell online.
I don’t think this will have too much impact for the affiliates out there. While the entry fees will be lower, the smart eBay sellers will opt for the little extras that drive up the fee but also (hopefully) drive up the potential for a sell. Thus, the impact should be negligible in the long run, short of eBay lowering fees across the board.
What is the strategy?
Fairly simple. There are two approaches you can take. One, shoot for niches that have a high volume of sales. I know of one niche where an eBay store owner sells several thousand a day worth of items that cost less than $5. That is volume.
The second option is to go for niches that have good volume and tend to occur higher fees. Certain electronics come to mind.
A third option of course is to just keep building stores. The more the merrier right!
Last night I completed a big development milestone, moving me even closer to a beta release, perhaps closer than I had originally anticipated. I will be doing some more testing, on my own sites, either this weekend or early next week, but so far it is looking pretty good.
What’s Next?
With this milestone met I have one other rather important feature to implement, then I will be focusing on building some templates. As I’ve mentioned before, I will probably start with a half dozen or so, but depending on how quickly that goes I might make some more before the beta testing proceeds.
The title says it all really. I’ve spent the last two days getting some core admin functionality in place. It wasn’t overly difficult, just a little time consuming. I also got my second site up and running. While the site itself isn’t spectacular in that it is a lot like the UsedMacMini.com site, it did allow me to test out the install process that I mentioned I worked on. With the exception of me forgetting to add some SQL for the database, it went flawlessly.
In putting together the second site I have noticed a few things that I forgot about, so I’ll have to address those pretty soon before I’m ready for other to beta test this thing. Speaking of which, a few people have already volunteered to test for me which is great! If you want to be included, I’m adding a simple contact form at the bottom of this post. Just drop me a note and I’ll add you to the list. I would expect another week or maybe two before it is ready for someone to try out.
While I’m going to try to make it as production ready as possible, there might be some rough edges that I’ve yet to smooth out. With that in mind, it would be helpful for me and less frustrating for you, if you have some experience in installing other software packages. It could blogs, store builders of some sort or other, or anything else like that. It would help with troubleshooting. Just in case
OpenAds is a great ad serving software that powers many sites worldwide. While it is an open source software and thus free for anyone to install and use, they are now offering a hosted solution. For free.
This is perfect is you have a blog, niche site or whatever and don’t have the expertise to install the software or just don’t want the hassle.
The last two nights have been pretty productive for me with my niche store software. I first implemented RSS feeds which is a nice feature to have. Oh yea, it will also work for search results You can see an example on my first site, UsedMacMini.com. Notice the gray RSS logo/button. Last night I worked on the install process which is pretty much complete now, so that is covered and naturally greatly eases things.
While working last night I uncovered a big goof on my part. Seems the way I was including the CJ ID was incorrect, so nothing was getting tracked in commission junction. Oops! No tracking, no commission! So I got that fixed and verified by checking CJ this morning that I had some clicks on the new site. Glad I found that one early!
How did I know?
How was I aware that clicks were even happening in the first place? Ah yes, I have added a feature that tracks how many clicks are going to the item detail page and how many are going from the item detail page off to ebay via the “place bid” link. This is far better than the hack I had to do for click tracking in BANS, and it happens under the covers, no javascript for this one. It tracks the item clicked by item ID and title, and the time the click happened, as well as the IP address.
What’s next?
Well I still have some admin features to work on. I need to implement a couple and clean up a few others. Hopefully sometime this weekend I’ll get most of them finished. Once I finish those I will work on building out the templates, which shouldn’t take too long.
I also need to work on a report page for that cool click tracking feature I mentioned above. At the moment I just go directly to the db through phpMyAdmin to look at it, but that isn’t user friendly.
Stay tuned for more. And if you want to be added to the beta testers list let me know!
I got my first store built using my new niche store builder today. As I mentioned in my previous post, building a better niche store, I decided to create my own software for building eBay niche stores.
I had a few minor hickups due to configuration between my development environment and my server, but nothing show stopping. I still need to build an install process to create the database and create the configuration files, so I will have to work on that. In the mean time I’m going to get a few more stores up that I’ve already bought the domains for and put this thing through its paces.
What is the store?
Oh yea, the first store to go up is UsedMacMini.com. Take a look and tell what you think! I realize the end result doesn’t show much of the software itself so when I get a chance I’ll create some screenshots of the admin interface to kind of give you an idea of how it works.
I’ve already got a name for the software and the domain name purchased so I’ll work on that as well and perhaps get some beta testers to try it out. If you are interested drop me a note and I’ll get back to you.
One thing to note however, I didn’t realize it until after I deployed the app that I used some PHP5-only features. This wasn’t a big deal for me as my hosting provider, site5, supports PHP5. So if you want to be a beta tester be sure you have access to a PHP5 server. If you don’t site5 is a good choice
Given my recent disappointment with BANS, I decided to build my own niche store builder. Well, after a few weeks of working weekends, a couple hours a night here and there I’m almost ready to deploy my first site using my new software.
What makes it special?
First and foremost, it separates the application logic from the templates. This was my single biggest complaint about BANS — far too much was embedded in PHP in the core application files. Being a professional software developer I couldn’t stand for that. So, first thing was to allow as much freedom as possible to build, and thus customize, templates as the user sees fit.
For those not intimately familiar with BANS or just use the default templates and default operation this may not be a big deal. But trust me, it is a big deal. What if you want to completely change how the menu is built? Have fun with that… What if you want to build your own search box? Yeah, good luck. How about completely changing how the products are listed? Happy searching.
These are all items that are deep in the core PHP code and thus hard to change and you risk breaking your site by messing with the PHP code that you shouldn’t even have to look at in the first place. Yes, you will need some PHP skills, but it will be PHP embedded in the HTML not the other way around. Perhaps you want a custom looking menu. No problem really, you will be given the objects that represent the content categories and the store pages. From these you access the properties and build as you see fit. This is just one simple example, but the whole package is written this way. You have a set of objects given to you and you build the template as you see fit. All of the data (most as objects) that is needed is provided to you allowing you complete customization.
Speaking of templates
The first set of templates that will be provided will be very SEO friendly, with content order precedence using CSS based layouts. Most likely they will utilize the Yahoo! UI libraries, namely the grids component for layouts and the reset CSS library as well. Note that using the Yahoo! stuff is not a prerequisite for building any template, I just happen to like them and the admin interface uses the same libraries.
Out of the box I’ll probably provide the basic half dozen or so combinations to account for two column, three column, fixed width, fluid widths, etc. Then I might throw in one or two special templates just for geewiz sakes
The big feature
It should have most of the features of the current 2.0 version of BANS with one big extra feature. That extra feature is the ability to view an eBay item without having to go to eBay. So say you have a listing of items for a given category. All good and fine. Well, as soon the visitor clicks on one of the listings they are taken to eBay. What if they didn’t like that item? You hope they hit the back button and come back to your site, but let’s face it they have left and you have no other option. Maybe you will get lucky and they will browse around on their own using eBay’s search and eventually buy something thus giving you credit.
Well, with mine when they click on an item, it will show that item’s details within the site itself. It will have a “place bid” link or button where they can actually go and place their bid withing eBay. This way they are not taken from your site and away from what they were looking at, your listings.
SEO
Yes, it will use SEO friendly URLs. This goes for the site links themselves as well as links that end up going to eBay. So the visitor should never see a URL that points directly to eBay. Although, because you have the flexibility, you could do so if you so choose.
When it comes to category URLs, keywords and such, the admin interface will actually help you out. Let’s say you enter the eBay category number 11189, which happens to be Vintage Computing Products. So you put in the category number in the appropriate text field, and after you do the URL field, Title field and keywords fields will all get automatically populated for you. You can override these default values if you like, but it is a nice time saver.
Searching
The search functionality will also be improved in some areas. With BANS, the search is done via an HTTP POST, which means the only thing you see in your address bar is http://sitename.com/search. The problem with this is that the user can’t bookmark this search and it doesn’t show up correctly in analytics packages. If the user searches for Atari for example, it should show http://sitename.com/search/Atari. That way you will see that URL in your Google Analytics or whatever tracking software you are using.
Why does this matter?
Well, what if 80% of your visitors are searching for the same thing? Or variations of the same thing? That is very valuable information for you. You can use that info to target those keywords in ads or in content, or maybe make a menu item specifically for that search phrase for a better customer experience.
So when is it going live?
Honestly if I wasn’t so picky it would be done by now :). My hope is to have my first site up sometime this weekend perhaps (January 12-13). The major functionality is all there and with a few quirks is almost done. I need to do some polishing up of the admin interface and finish a couple things I don’t like, but that is just my finickiness really. I also need to actually do the graphic and CSS stuff for the test site. Right now it is about as plain as it comes, as in plain text…
Given that I’ll keep tweaking it as I go. Now, if there is any interest in this I’ll certainly move things along a lot quicker
