Has Anybody Had Success With NetShops

Submitted by gronesy on Thu, 05/29/2008 - 12:30.

Hello all,

I selected a niche and NetShops has a datafeed for the merchant I've selected.

The problem is I can NEVER get that area of the site to load. Red flag.

Has anybody else worked with NetShops and their datafeeds with any success?

I've heard a lot of good things about them and I would be able to feed exactly the data I need from their tables IF I can ever get it to work.

Any help here would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Jeff

I've never heard of them?

Submitted by Jeremy Palmer on Fri, 05/30/2008 - 19:55.

I've never heard of them? Are you referring to this company?
http://www.netshops.com/

I consulted for NetShops for

Submitted by Chuck Hamrick on Fri, 05/30/2008 - 23:04.

I consulted for NetShops for several years and they are the largest niche store company in the business with 220 stores. Their stores are running through Direct Track and their datafeeds can be a bit tricky. They serve via several options http://www.netshopsaffiliates.com/university/datafeeds.php

Their AM Sara Austad is active on their forum: http://forum.abestweb.com/forumdisplay.php?f=131 and her profile is here: http://forum.abestweb.com/member.php?find=lastposter&t=102988

Thanks for the info Chuck

Submitted by gronesy on Wed, 06/04/2008 - 12:52.

Hi Chuck,

It appears to me that I had better find another source for datafeeds if I'm going to use them for my store. The pisser is that they have the largest multi-vendor specialty store for my niche. If I have to put together a site from multiple sources it will quintuple my workload and maintenance.

I still can't get the datafeeds page to load and have not heard back from Sara since last week. I've sent a follow-up earlier this week and she has dropped the ball.

Also, following the great forum link you gave(thanks for that)I see they have been having problems with datafeeds since at least January-crap. I was really hoping to be able to use them for this project.

Any suggestions on where else I might turn?

Jeff

Twitter: http://twitter.com/gronesy

i can't get the netshops

Submitted by Stephen Carter on Sun, 06/22/2008 - 16:37.

i can't get the netshops datafeeds page to load either when i'm logged in as an affiliate. but what about the dynamic datafeed page?

they offer code that you can use to login to their mirrored database so that you can extract feeds dynamically. they have PHP, ASP, and ColdFusion code snippets. you could come at it from that angle. perhaps write code to download the datafeed once per day onto your server. after that, access it locally. i do that with product information from Amazon.com

See this page http://www.netshopsaffiliates.com/university/realtime.php

Stephen Carter
creator of Review Foundry

I worked out an interim solution....

Submitted by gronesy on Sat, 07/05/2008 - 16:02.

Stephen,

I wanted to thank you for your suggestion and let you know that I worked out an interim suggestion until I can get my own mysql database set up with a dynamic landing page.

What I'm doing is modifying the SQL query to pull the data for each brand I want to promote. After I run the query, I'm switching to source view and copying the html and pasting it on the appropriate page in my WP site. The query has formatting built into it which I can modify if I so desire. However, I've got to say that it looks very professional the way it is. I'd like to change the text description formatting to highlight certain elements but for now visitors will be able to search and find the items they want AND I'll have html that I can use for landing pages.

I know it sounds like a whole lot more work than getting the netshops rep to email you a datafeed, navicatting it into a mysql database and then creating a dynamic landing page but the last piece of this process is a skill set I don't possess and I want to get this site up ASAP as it's been in the concept and framework stage too long.

Let me know what you think of my idea and if you think I'm insane.

Best,

Jeff
Twitter: http://twitter.com/gronesy

yes Jeff, you certainly do

Submitted by Stephen Carter on Sun, 07/06/2008 - 19:17.

yes Jeff, you certainly do make it sound like a lot of work :)

while you do have to be a little insane to be an affiliate at all, at the suggestion of anything manual i immediately bail out. your aim, i think, should be to extract data from netshops using a scheduled cron job to retrieve the data, parse it, and store it locally as separate fields on your site (in the database). that's one part of the process. the other is to fetch data locally and format it for presentation in your web pages (landing pages or other). that's the only long term approach that i find feasible.

i'm not familiar with navicat so i don't know if you can use it to update your datafeeds on a regular basis. i didn't get that impression watching the BIP sessions. but maybe.

either way, provided you eventually figure out an automated process for updating your data on a regular basis, that's the main thing. my amazon data can change on a daily basis so i try to have it update every 24 to 48 hours. netshops on the other hand is likely to have longer time scales for price changes because they represent only one merchant, whereas amazon represents hundreds or thousands all competing to display the lowest price.

Stephen Carter
creator of Review Foundry

Tumri CornerStore

Submitted by Cal (not verified) on Mon, 06/02/2008 - 20:47.

Thanks for a lot of things, Jeremy!

Yes PopShops is good especially if you're affiliated with
CJ, Linkshare, Shareasale, etc.

I had the impression that CornerStore requires only one
affiliate registration. There is a big write up about Tumri at http://www.5staraffiliateprograms.com/online-marketing-widget.html
except all links to it are inactive.

Any information about what happened to Tumri CornerStore?

Thanks All!