ShopCentral - Shops Made Easy, New Product Launch!

[Kris Kennedy]

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I'd like to introduce you to ShopCentral, buy.at's latest product launch making affiliate shops easy.



What is ShopCentral?

In a nutshell, ShopCentral is a user installable shop built on buy.at's API that can be setup in seconds and fully customised in the Management Area. This shop gives you a live-feed shopping engine with minimal effort, offering millions of merchant products that earn commission on user purchases.

ShopCentral's innovations lie in its implementation, designed for complete ease of use and simplicity for our affiliates. With minimal running requirements, an install and update process that your Gran could take care of and the ability to exhibit millions of commissionable products on your site in minutes on your own customised store, your choice of shop builder has just been made easy.

You can customise the shop to suit your needs but we've designed some pre-built templates (including a Christmas theme) for you to use, like the examples below:





ShopCentral - Key Features:

• Minimal running requirements
• Simple install
• Maintained using the Management Area (no need to re-upload shop after editing)
• Setup in minutes
• No maintenance - powered by buy.at's API with real-time feed access
• Access to millions of products across hundreds of merchant feeds
• Customisable to suit your needs (both in design or presentation but also in content and feature set)

Oh, and you can have as many shops as you like and it's completely free.

I want one. Where can I find ShopCentral?

You will find ShopCentral in your Affiliate Management Area under "Content & Creative", or click here: https://users.buy.at/ma/index.php/ips

This interface allows you to setup, edit and download your shop and contains a PDF install guide.

If you need more convincing or want to see a demo shop in action visit buy.at Labs: ShopCentral | buy.at's lab for new affiliate technologies

There's more to come...

This is just the beginning for ShopCentral and we want you to help us make it as good as it can possibly be. We've implemented the shop fundamentals but there's plenty of room for growth and new feature sets.

The core product is there - now let's hear what you've got to say. We've implemented a feedback widget on every page of the Management Area (hovering along the right side of the interface). It's not just for ShopCentral though, let us know what you think so we can continuously refine and improve our products and services across the board.

As always, feel free to PM me with any questions or contact your Client Services representative.

Best regards,

Kris Kennedy
Project Manager
kris.kennedy@corp.aol.com

[Pete Cheyne]

Hi All,

To follow up on last week's launch, we hope you have had the chance to look and play with ShopCentral over the weekend. In light of this, we are launching a competition this week to see who can demonstrate the "Most Original Use of ShopCentral".

This competition is open to all affiliates, and the winner will receive £250 which we will happily double if we see you at the buy.at Christmas Cracker!

Ok, so here are the competition rules:

• All entries must be made by posting a direct URL to your effort onto this thread
• All entries must be a real web implementation of ShopCentral, no Photoshops :laugh
• All entries must be posted before the closing date of Monday 7th December 12pm
• You can submit as many entries as you like
• Non standard implementations of ShopCentral are encouraged, so whip out your best CSS hat
• The winner will be chosen and announced in this thread by 5pm on the Monday

As Kris said in his post, you can access ShopCentral here, you can see one in action over at buy.at Labs, and there is a setup guide here.

Let me know if you have any further questions, and we look forward to your entries!

Cheers

[smingle]

Nice idea and very easy to use

This would work ideal for those affiliates who are not very confident at building their own sites or haven't got a clue with product feeds.

I will be trialling this on some of my domains, as they are simple to integrate and manipulate ! Great to see a network being very proactive in their creation of tools for affiliates.

Well done and keep up the good work buyat

[Sproates]

Hi everyone,

We are currently putting together a couple of guides for ShopCentral for those of you who wish to tinker with it beyond what can be done out of the box: one guide for customising the skins/styles, and another for techie aspects such as changing the functions of the shop and integrating it with an existing site.

In the meantime if anyone has any techie questions about customising their ShopCentral shop or has problems installing it or getting it to work, please contact me at ian.sproates@corp.aol.com.

[Dazza30]

We are currently putting together a couple of guides for ShopCentral for those of you who wish to tinker with it beyond what can be done out of the box: one guide for customising the skins/styles, and another for techie aspects such as changing the functions of the shop and integrating it with an existing site.

Any idea as to when the guides you mention will be ready?

[Sproates]

Any idea as to when the guides you mention will be ready?

They should be available sometime in the week beginning 14th December.

Give me a shout if you need to know anything specific in the meantime.

[Dapper]

Hi All,

To follow up on last week's launch, we hope you have had the chance to look and play with ShopCentral over the weekend. In light of this, we are launching a competition this week to see who can demonstrate the "Most Original Use of ShopCentral".

This competition is open to all affiliates, and the winner will receive £250 which we will happily double if we see you at the buy.at Christmas Cracker!

Ok, so here are the competition rules:

• All entries must be made by posting a direct URL to your effort onto this thread
• All entries must be a real web implementation of ShopCentral, no Photoshops :laugh
• All entries must be posted before the closing date of Monday 7th December 12pm
• You can submit as many entries as you like
• Non standard implementations of ShopCentral are encouraged, so whip out your best CSS hat
• The winner will be chosen and announced in this thread by 5pm on the Monday

As Kris said in his post, you can access ShopCentral here, you can see one in action over at buy.at Labs, and there is a setup guide here.

Let me know if you have any further questions, and we look forward to your entries!

Cheers

Hi Pete

Here is my entry for the competition City Breaks Deals. Cant wait for some more templates and features to be added.

Thanks
Dapper

[Pete Cheyne]

Well the competition close date has passed and I now have the unenviable task of choosing the winner. To be honest, it's been a tough call but I have managed to decide who deserves the £250 before the 5pm deadline

Dapper and his City Break Deals has won, so ping me a mail with your details mate, and we will get the cash across to you.

Throughout the past week there has been some great feedback and ideas, all these are now being worked on with important stuff like guides to tinker with the styling, features to help integrate with your existing Websites, etc.

So in lieu of this, we are going to hold a second round of the same competition which will run into the New Year. This will give you all a chance to use the guides and take advantage of the new additions as they are released.

To confirm, another £250 is up for grabs, same rules as before and you have until the New Year. If you have any questions/ideas/suggestions/etc just post them on this thread and we will get back to you.

Cheers,

[scriptmonkey]

They should be available sometime in the week beginning 14th December.

Give me a shout if you need to know anything specific in the meantime.

Are these available yet?

And is there anyway to access the product calls without using the template system, either using REST or SOAP?

[Sproates]

Are these available yet?

Not yet, they will be available within the next couple of days.

And is there anyway to access the product calls without using the template system, either using REST or SOAP?

Officially this is a 'coming soon' feature. If you'd like to get a sneak preview, please get in touch with Siri Andersen (siri.andersen@corp.aol.com) who is our affiliate development manager.

[scriptmonkey]

Cheers, I've emailed Siri.

[Ben Taylor]

Integrating ShopCentral Search form into your own pages.

Weve had a couple of people asking how to integrate the ShopCentral search form into their homepages, so I thought I would post here in case it helps anyone.

To add search to your landing page you would need to setup a form with a method="GET" and an action pointing to index.php in the directory you have installed ShopCentral in. Within the form you will need an input with the name 'query', and a hidden input with the name of 'page' and a value of 'search'.

For example if you want to add the form to your sites main index page, and you have installed ShopCentral in a directory /shop/, you would set up a form similar to:

<form action="shop/index.php" method="GET">
<input name="query" type="text">
<input type="hidden" name="page" value="search">
<input type="submit" value="Search">
</form>


Nb: The search results page will be served in the ShopCentral skin you have chosen. You can however edit the main.css file for your chosen skin to customise the look and feel.

Ben

[scriptmonkey]

I emailed Siri a few days ago, but, no reply as yet, I'm really keen to get started with any other methods of accessing the product data.

[Sproates]

Hi scriptmonkey,

I've just emailed you with more information.

Thanks for your patience, and have a good weekend.

Ian

[Dapper]

Hi everyone,

We are currently putting together a couple of guides for ShopCentral for those of you who wish to tinker with it beyond what can be done out of the box: one guide for customising the skins/styles, and another for techie aspects such as changing the functions of the shop and integrating it with an existing site.

In the meantime if anyone has any techie questions about customising their ShopCentral shop or has problems installing it or getting it to work, please contact me at ian.sproates@corp.aol.com.

Hi Sproates

Are the guides ready yet?

Thanks
Dapper