How not to set up an affiliate system...

[seany]

I’m starting development again!... last month I created a oscommerce site which I changed into an affiliates system, spent the time to create an import formatter for the datafeeds of the products and styled the site.

Once all the products were imported… over 15,000 of them, the site grinded to a holt!
It was just too slow, I tried a few things to speed it up but no luck, so I put up a shopping directory (to at least get the spiders indexing) for now until I get the .net/mysql version ready.

I aiming for a comparison shopping site of products NOT shops, but don’t want a big back end for setup.

I might write a blog on the process like a lot of people here.

Few questions if you would help out.
1) Is it better to host all the product pictures on your server for speed?
2) How do you deal with categories (I find these difficult to manage as data feeds have too many levels eg (Cameras and Photography->Digital->Cannon) and all different for different networks?
3) How do you make the data feed content unique or do you have too?
4) looking for .net hosting with mysql (need 2 hosting accounts to start).

Best Regards
Seany

P.S
I love oscommerce sites, I have developed several for clients so it's not a blast on oscommerce.

[Brendon]

> 1) Is it better to host all the product pictures on your server for speed?

If you have lots of images, get a separate image server. Small box, big pipe, high bandwidth capacity. So long as you reference the imgs correctly, it'll work fine

> 2) How do you deal with categories (I find these difficult to manage as data feeds have too many levels eg (Cameras and Photography->Digital->Cannon) and all different for different networks?

That's a DBA issue, and there are as many answers as there are DBAs'...

> 3) How do you make the data feed content unique or do you have too?

You should try, otherwise you are likely to be filtered out as dupe content. Think about user value, and what YOU can add to the feed info to encourage someone to use your feed based site, not one of the other 600 out there...

> 4) looking for .net hosting with mysql (need 2 hosting accounts to start).

*shrug* sorry, don't know. I know 1 outfit in Colchester that does a lot of .net hosting (the owners are both ex-M$, so they are pretty good at it, too) called Jamie Plc

[Muller2]

Originally Posted by seany 2) How do you deal with categories (I find these difficult to manage as data feeds have too many levels eg (Cameras and Photography->Digital->Cannon) and all different for different networks?

I would like to know peoples suggestions to that question as well

Al

[lowndsy]

Me too. Also, how do you go about no categories at all below the master category - for example an entire feed being labelled "music" with no genres.