WordPress Affiliate store builder to care about ?

GoldenCan: GoldenCAN is a datafeed integration service. They get the datafeeds, parse them, remove the garbage, and give you some copy and paste code to add little shops to your blog for merchant products. It’s free, costs no money, and is paid for by taking every “4th” click generated from your site. There are, however, 75 or so merchants that have paid to make their feed completely free (and you get all the clicks). Great little service for being free - not enough (in my opinion) to build a fully featured affiliate store.

PopShops: I only got interested in PopShops because I found out they had a Blogger, Typepad, and Wordpress Widget. Their basic account is free, and the “Pro” version with SEO friendly URL’s is only $5 per month. With the widget, when you blog in Wordpress using the visual editor, you can popup a window that allows you to search for products, and the results that come back are from all the merchant’s datafeeds they have in their database (some 20 million products). I liked their service (and still use it), but the only cons for me were the fact that you can only look up and add one product at a time, and you had to be very careful that you were signed up for the merchant the product came from (or no commissions for you!).

WebMerge: WebMerge is downloadable software that you install on your computer to parse a merchant affiliate datafeed file and created static web pages from it. It’s $99 for a single user license. I’m sure it can do what it says, but I’ve been building web sites for 13 years and I found it hard to use, hard to setup, and the static pages I created were pretty piss poor, even after creating a “template”.

My Datafeed Scripts: This site sells scripts that parse ShareASale datafeeds (only). I’m sure they work fine, but I wouldn’t pay a hundred bucks for scripts that only work for ShareASale merchants.

Feedshare: Feedshare seems to have a great service, with the ability to build mini-shops as well. You can also setup products and shops using both JavaScript and PHP. The drawback seems to be they only have 45 merchants listed, and the only one who I even knew was Overstock.com. This service appears to be free, so there’s your “pro”.

AffiliStore: When I found Affilistore I really thought I had the holy grail. This free downloadable script sets up an affiliate store that sucks up datafeed files and creates products, categories, and pages including seo titles and descriptions. The sample stores look great, but I found the script provided very mixed results depending on your datafeed format. In the end, it was too much work, categories weren’t working right, some links were breaking, and it was just taking completely too much time for what it was worth. It basically would have been a BANS like niche store, but with affiliate links from a datafeed. I’m glad this never worked out (for me), now that google is attacking “thin affiliate” sites anyway. You’re welcome to try it out, but be warned - “your mileage may vary…

This is from JTpratt blog.. very helpful info.