AffiliateWindow.com Shop Window Review
Last week we saw the launch of Affiliatewindow.com ShopWindow Tool set.“ShopWindow provides partners with a live feed shopping engine that can be embedded into any site with minimal effort. It uniquely enables users to search Affiliate Window’s database of over 3 million products from over 600 retailers on a sale popularity basis.”
So what is it?
What does it do?
Who can use it?
Who better to ask then Andrew Tilley of EssexStage, an affiliate who has been getting to grips with the new “wonder comparison tool”.“EssexStage site grew out of the fact that my kids are all on the stage so I decided to start adding some listings to a site for fun and it sort of errr…….grew. It was never intended to be a money making venture but then I started making a few bob on it. The other sites I’ve done are shamelessly money making attempts as I was working for an seo agency in 2005 and learned how to do it. I suspect a lot of people build a site first and then realise it can make money after – hell, wasn’t that what google did?
Shop window is effectively an online price comparison website ‘out of the box’. It means that anyone can launch of those really clever looking websites that rely on product feeds without knowing anything about product feeds or xml. My experience with website building is that html designers do not necessarily know anything about importing feeds or tweaking them, let alone displaying them on a site. Shopwindow effectively does all of that for you. It gives you a fully functional website, across an enormous range of products and categories, with a very small amount of setup and tweaking.
The great thing about it also is that you don’t need to add/amend the product data as merchants are automatically added whenever you add a merchant to your portfolio in Affiliate Window. As someone who has been thinking of learning about product feeds, this has, for the time being, stopped me from spending money on Amazon.
The Shop technology for this is new!!! Users should remember that and expect some teething problems. The technical support team at AW have been dealing with tons of queries. One of the biggest problems has been flagging adult content which was showing even though most of us had it switched off (not nice when you link the thing from a children’s site like I also do – even though I found that most of the kids were not fazed at all!!!!!).
There have also been problems around quotas. Each user was allowed a certain number of calls to their api (their unique identifier) but most of us found out that testing and the bots soon used all of the initial quota up very quickly. This seems to have been ironed out now – Easter will be a testing time with 4 working days out – and quotas have been increased upon request.
Are there any disadvantages to using this? I suspect that the search engines will not view so many similar stores too favourably – so unless you are confident of tweaking the thing hugely, it will be better to link from other sites, but time will tell on that one I guess. If you know css and php, you certainly can mould the whole thing beyond recognition.
If you don’t know it, it doesn’t matter as it will work very quickly and easily. I’ve certainly found it useful, if only to find a new trampoline cover for the garden that disintegrated during the winter to see an example of the shop window you can go here “Affiliatewindow.com have never been scared to innovate and the risks that come with unleashing a new tool, will affiliates like it? Will they use it? are all the bugs fixed? are just that, it’s a risk. But isn’t this what this technology lead industry all about? It’s about sticking your neck out and not being scared to be different.
As you can see shop window is now out in the open and being tested and is still in test mode. The only way to get it perfect is for affiliates to keep sending in their feedback to the guys and girls at affiliatewindow.com
Shop Window has only just been launched but early indications are from the affiliates that I have spoken to, all give it a tentative thumbs up.
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