Umbraco eBay Affiliate Feed

By leen3o on Jan 05 2010 | 4 Comments

A long time ago I used to be into doing lots of affiliate stuff, building sites then driving traffic to them and making bits of money here and there – I remembered recently that I still had an active account on the eBay Affiliate Network (https://www.ebaypartnernetwork.com) and thought it would be cool to make a little eBay Affiliate Feed project for Umbraco so everyone else can easily make money from their sites.

I thought I would try my hand at a screen cast… Never again!  But here it is anyway, or you can spare yourself the pain of listening to me droning on and read below the video.

Its fairly customisable and once installed the project creates a Macro which has the following properties:

macro-insert

The Search Term

This is the search term you want to pass to eBay, the more specific you are the better the results you will get – If you use the search in conjunction with a sellerID you can return quite specific results.

Seller ID

Optional: If you know of a seller that sells niche products which compliment your site, then you can add their eBay user ID here – If you add a Seller ID and it will only search for your search term within the users products.  Alternatively if you want to just display all the Sellers products then leave the ‘Search Term’ property blank and it will just return all their products.

Campaign ID

This is the most important part, you can get your campaign ID by logging into your account and clicking on the ‘Campaigns’ tab

https://www.ebaypartnernetwork.com

Amount Of Items To show

Pretty self explanatory, a numeric value of how many products you would like to show (Max 100)

eBay Site

This property lets you choose which eBay site to pull the products through from, currently the eBay Partner Network only supports the following eBay sites (You must put the site in a it shows below)

  • eBay AU
  • eBay BE
  • eBay CA
  • eBay ES
  • eBay FR
  • eBay IN
  • eBay IT
  • eBay NL
  • eBay UK
  • eBay US

Custom Reference

This is a custom reference for your use in the reporting section of the eBay partner network, for example you could have products in blog posts and in the footer – So you would have ‘blogposts’ as one custom reference and ‘footer’ as the other.

I do hope this package is useful for someone, and not just for me – You should be able to style the results to match most sites, but all the source code is in the user control in case you want to hack around.

Capture

Post info
Categories: Umbraco

Comments

Lee
Lee United Kingdom on 1/5/2010 8:05 PM One last thing I forgot to mention is if you are savvy, and sell a lot of stuff on eBay you should be able to work out how to pull through your own products - And thus getting a kick back from selling your own stuff ;)  

Shhh don't tell anyone I told you that!.. LOL
Hendy
Hendy United Kingdom on 1/6/2010 1:03 AM Don't abandon screen casts ! (what was the Firebug like tool  you were using in the last few seconds ?)
Lee
Lee United Kingdom on 1/6/2010 6:06 AM Hey Hendy - Thanks for the comment, the Firebug like tool was the built in inspector for Chrome.  If you right click on your page and click inspect you get the inspector up which is similar to FireBug (I think its actually the same inspector that comes with Safari)
Soeren Sprogoe
Soeren Sprogoe Denmark on 1/6/2010 12:14 PM Nice macro Smile

The fact that Umbraco macro's is build around XML/XSLT makes the system EXTREMELY flexible when it comes to this stuff. I've build several sites myself, that makes good use of Amazon's affiliate program.

Just hook into their XML feed, transform it to your liking via Umbraco's XSLT macro's, and you have something flexible, automated and pretty darn powerfull!