Affiliate tools

[tbp]

The stock checker is actually pretty easy to do. Did one myself as an experiment as to how viable it would be, and it actually works extremely well.

Can also add on to it so that it emails people in a mailing list when the product comes back into stock.

Was thinking about doing one for the Wii after seeing the thread the other day, but had a look round and there were already a number of them doing the same thing.

[whiterabbit]

all freebies gratefully received! Sounds like the stock checker may have been done - could you make it more generic - so you could pass parameters for it to look for and return? That way it could pick off stock, current price, special offers, etc.

Just a thought...

[adrian]

Originally Posted by Cheapdvds i dont have it in front of me at the moment , i will pm u later. just so it is clear as well , i did not write this script , i was given it. u add links that u want checking and a certain parameter that will identifiy if it is in stock , and that is basicly it , its one PHP file that you just access via the site

Hi Cheapdvds,

Have just sent you a PM. Would be very grateful if you could also send it on my direction

Cheers

Adrian

[jamie07051975]

Originally Posted by whiterabbit all freebies gratefully received! Sounds like the stock checker may have been done - could you make it more generic - so you could pass parameters for it to look for and return? That way it could pick off stock, current price, special offers, etc. Just a thought...

I'll have a think to what can be done. In the mean time any other ideas greatfully received. Anything that would make an affiliate life easier...

[philhancox]

A free version of Affmeter
Even just a script that plonks commission data onto a page of my choosing would be handy

[jamie07051975]

Originally Posted by philhancox A free version of Affmeter Even just a script that plonks commission data onto a page of my choosing would be handy

I've heared AffMeter being mentioned around - from what I have seen it's a PC application based tool which collects all of your commission details from the various networks you use. Is that correct?

[philhancox]

Yup. It was free then they changed it a few months back, now I can't uninstall the thing and adds another 5 minutes to my computer loading time when it tries looking for it.
Which is why I would prefer a web based solution

[stu-art]

I'll second that - A web based version of a commission checker :-)

[jamie07051975]

Originally Posted by stu-art I'll second that - A web based version of a commission checker :-)

OK. Now if I did start this as a project what features would be needed? Can you split them up into must haves and second phase?

[proseef]

I planed to design one software that can check the price and affiliatelink of lots of stores previous. I gave up now. I think it's impossible and no search enginee can do it now.

[tbp]

The commission checked wouldn't be too hard either, because again its just page scraping the affiliate sites. Some networks now have API's though which means its a lot easier to access report data.

One thing with this kind though is the trust issue, obviously affiliates need to enter account details into the software so it can access the reports, and so really need to be able to trust its not being recorded somewhere and misused.

One thing you could do with the price / stock checker is to build an easy to use interface for adding new merchants / products. With my version, it uses regular expresssions to access the correct data from the correct location on the page. Its fine for me as I know how to create regular expressions, but for a coding beginner regular expressions can be a nightmare to get working and understand.

If you built an interface that allows the user to somehow mark where the code to scrape is on the page, and then it build the regular expressions dynamically, that would open up the whole system a lot and make it a lot easier for non techies to use.

[jamie07051975]

Originally Posted by tbp The commission checked wouldn't be too hard either, because again its just page sc