AffiliStore v1.0 Pro Review
I recently decided to give Affilistore v1.0 Pro a trial after seeing some good reviews about it over the web. The creator is a regular contributor to the A4UForum and his technical skills are second to none.
As a mini-case study I’ll be documenting the process, describing how I get on with the install and hopefully suggesting a few potential features. My initial fears are that it will be difficult to get organic traffic with most of the text coming direct from the product feeds so this may be one of the more challenging aspects of the project.
For this I am going to use the domain name treatdad.co.uk which I purchased a few years ago and never did anything with (much like most of my domain names in fact).
7.15pm: The wife is out for the evening and it’s time to boot up my FTP client ready for action.
7.18pm: All uploaded. Time to view the Readme documentation.
7.21pm: Skimmed though, created a new MySql Database for it and assigned user privledges.
7.27pm: My progress is halted by an error when I try and run the install.php script - apparently I have what is known in the industry as an €œInvalid default value for ‘priceLimit’€. I’ve emailed Steve and asked for a solution. Decide to tidy the house a little whilst I await a reply.
7.53pm: Just got a reply with a replacement install.php file which seems to work. Need to pick up a datafeed now so going to sign up to Paid on Results and give Prezzybox a try first.
8.09pm: I’ve managed to sign up for an account, full of the datafeed and complete the installation. I made an error with the IMGUrl and tried to change this, but couldn’t find an easy way of changing the fields and regenerating the site, so had to delete the feed and try again.
8.10pm: The site seems to work, though I’m not sure where the €œSimilar Products€ part comes in. Apparently a Waters Friend Corkscrew is similar to a Silverstone Ferrari experience!
8.18pm: I’ve noticed a couple of bugs that need to be ironed out. The navigation is a little broken for example. I am going to try and add a second feed next.
8.32pm: Second feed added. Figures out the problem with the navigation which was due to a slightly broken feed - remove the extra fields that were not required (lots of image locations) and managed to fix it. Spoke to Steve who also said that there is the option to hide categories which could have done the same job.
8.41pm: I’ve added a news entry and will try and get one added every few days in the lead up to Fathers day - this is the best way I can think of to get some content driving though visitors
A quick point to make
In just over an hour I’ve managed to get up a fully functional site with two different feeds feating thousands of products - bear in mind the fact that I had a small problem with the install script and that’s pretty good going! The features are very good and I’m already sold.
My next main port of calls will be do try and change the skin a bit (I need a logo). I’ve managed to stick some tracking tags up so will look forward to my first visitor. I also want to add some more feeds from some different networks and see what happens!
So where do I see this product going?
My initial thoughts were to focus on some community aspects of the site - as most of the content is going to be duplicate (as it’s from feeds) there should be features to allow product reviews (with a simple CAPCHA form - no need for registration) and build some kind of community on top of it (simple blogs, forums, etc) - basically as much UGC as possible.
I’ll continue to add more details as the project goes on but for now I should go and do some more tidying before the wife gets back and wonders what I’ve been doing with myself for the past couple of hours.
February 13th, 2007 at 9:37 am
Hi James. I did try affilistore when I was setting up my affiliate challenge site. My one worry was that when you update the product feeds, would it not assign a new pid to the product which would in turn change the page name of that page. Wasn’t sure if there was a way round it but if there is it would be a very useful feature. Very impressed with how quick it is to setup a decent looking site though.
February 13th, 2007 at 11:11 am
Good point - one i’m not sure on and will look into tonight. I believe that the new version allows HTML Permalinks, so it may be you can format it by product name (which will help with SEO), rather than the ID numbers that are being used currently.
It makes sense that it should work this way - if not then it’s certainly a feature that is required to help with the SEO.
Will give this a try and let you know how I get on.
Our of interest, what did you use for the camping site in the end?
February 13th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
I went with pagerank10 script. It doesn’t look as nice as the affilistore basic template, and it doesn’t handle multiple feeds as well as affilistore seems to, but the urls’ are based on the ‘product id’ so if you use product name as product ID you have a nice keyword rich url. If I can just get my head around rewriting url’s I’l be ok!
February 20th, 2007 at 10:29 am
[...] you are a regular reader than you may remember my review of AffiliStore 1.0 on the 12th February. I’ve not touched that site since (despite promosing I’d do more [...]
May 27th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Hi! I have used affilistore with great success but the one issue I have is with changing the template look. Are there any decent resources you have come across with address the need to change the template?