We now have the price comparison service working with Link Share which is a major US affiliate network like Affiliate Window is for the UK.
We’ve also included the ability to manually add a comparison and affiliate link which is a good stop gap until we get more affiliate networks added. However, the prices won’t automatically update of course, so you’ll have to keep an eye on them if you’re that bothered about it.
I say that because the whole point of this exercise is to steer buyers towards Amazon.
Typically, Amazon have the lowest price including shipping. They will almost always make the sale – Craig quotes a figure of 80% – in fact it’s the good old 80-20 rule if you think about it.
So if you have a couple of manual prices and links for a smaller supplier that are out of date… I say, so what? It’s extremely likely that the visitor to your IPK site is going to click on the lowest price which is almost always Amazon.
If they click any of the other links in curiousity, then they’re going to get cookied, and if they buy from there, great! If not, it will likely be from Amazon, which is where we really want people to go.
Okay?
That means we now have Amazon US and UK, Affiliate Window, Link Share, and the ability to add affiliate links / comparison manually.
The Affiliate Window API (Application Programmers Interface) has also let us add the ability for you to select merchants who don’t stock the item, but who may well do in the future – it’s your call whether you use this or not. In all, the Affiliate Window API is so far the best we’ve come across and is very well thought out.
However, there’s always a few problems isn’t there?
We’ve written to Trade Doubler (UK and US) to ask for details of their API. Apparently they have one, but we can’t find it. We can’t do anything with them until we hear back.
The Link Share API seems to have an intermittent random glitch. Sometimes it works perfectly, sometimes it returns zero results for the same search. We cache everything returned in any search for 12 hours, but it’s not ideal.
It also has a habit of returning bad results with good. So we’ll sometimes get details of merchants supposedly stocking products, but if you click through there’s either no stock or no details of the product on the merchants site.
Not a big deal, but NOT right. There’s not much we can do about dealing with that at our end, we have to rely on the data that Link Share send us.
We’re going to write to them to ask what’s going on, if Paul hasn’t already beaten me and done it.
As we go along and we find new affiliate networks and they have (hopefully working) APIs, we’ll add them to the service.
Just bring it up in the forum.
And as I’ve mentioned the forum, I’m hoping to supply you with the details of that later today.
Just one thing though – it’s NOT a support forum. Any support requests will be closed and / or deleted. The forum is for discussion and sharing and raising issues. I know there’s a fine line between raising an issue and making a support request, and I’ll see if I can’t come up with some guide lines.
Tomorrow, we’ll open the Price Comparison service.
We think it’s as ready as it will ever be, but we have to do a few bits and pieces first to make the site presentable. We’ll do that today and open the doors tomorrow.
Remember I said the other day that it’s a one dollar one month trial. After the first month, the price goes up to the regular price, but you’ll quickly realise it’s worth every penny once you start using it.
At the moment, all prices are 50% off.
It’s a good deal.
More information later today and then tomorrow the service is live.
-Frank Haywood
P.S. If you haven’t already grabbed it, you can get Info Product Killer by going here and then entering promo code FHW777 to get IPK at $79 instead of $147.
