I’ve decided to take the plunge & set up my first datafeedr affiliate store, on The Green Directory, bringing together the product feeds of many eco-stores & fair trade suppliers. I’m still fine-tuning the exact settings but the whole process was pretty straightforward, the only issue so far being that as per usual with merchant datafeeds, sometimes the actual data is incorrect. For example, I’ve noticed that Adili have a lot of products in their feed, with a price of £0.00!  I’ve written to them, but who knows how long it could take to be corrected.

Datafeedr is a system which enables you to create & embed an affiliate store into your WordPress blog WITHOUT touching any clunky datafeed files, learning a programming language or hiring expensive programmers. I found the actual datafeedr shop “factory” very easy to use & enquiries have been answered within 24 hours on the support forum, which is an excellent response time. There are excellent video tutorials to help you through using the factory, integrating your shop into your WordPress blog & more.

I’m just looking into the Drip Feature which enables you to automatically post products to your blog, something that I’ve tried to do manually with my other sites. However, I also plan to add my own posts as well, rather than rely on the system, but it’s a great idea for those times when you might just be too busy with other things to post as much as you should. Just need to get it configured properly.

The one store I’ve set up initially costs $27 per month, but once this store is set up & functioning, I may upgrade to the next plan, which allows the creation of up to 5 different stores. I really want to use it on My Travel Extras to offer a decent travel accessories store, to set up the seperate ticket sales websites, for which I bought the domains www.buyeventtickets.co.uk, www.buyeventickets.co.uk, www.cheapeventtickets.co.uk & www.cheapeventickets.co.uk & to get www.webtraveloffers.com & www.scifigoodies.co.uk domains up & running. The five site plan costs $47, so hopefully, I can get enough sales to cover the costs!

I’ve decided to switch supplier for my mobile phone offers website despite actually making a couple of sales through it at the start of the year.

The site appeared to be not working properly for some time; it had lost the custom text & meta-tags that I had added to the site & no responses were forthcoming when I wrote to the support team. As a result, I wasn’t sure that the site was even functioning properly & I decided to leave it whilst I worked on other projects. Going through the posts on the A4U forum, it seems a number of other people have had the same problems with non-payment & no replies to their enquiries.

I decided to send mobileshop.com an invoice for the outstanding monies & have received a reply from their accounts team to say that the money will be paid. So anyone with money due to them from this program might want to send their invoice to lisa.hartley@valuecomparison.co.uk. Value Comparison seems to be converting previously retail sites into comparison sites & would be a company I would like to deal with, if they actually answered any e-mails, or replied to postings on A4U!!

I have a broadband comparison domain that I would like to use & the laptop comparison site would also be useful, but if the company ignores its affiliates, what is the point? To be fair, my enquiries up to now have been with mobileshop.com, so maybe contact with Value Comparison directly will have a better response. Will let you know!

In the meantime, Mobiles4Me has now switched to the e2save affiliate program & I am now promoting the site again, through link building for now & possibly with a blog soon.