Money-Code » rover

EPN change to RSS

admin — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:58:08 +0000

So I mentioned earlier that BANS users were experiencing problems at the same time of my issues with dynamic RSS search results. It also appears that some phpBayPro users as well as a few other EPN scripts are experiencing issues. On the EPN board ‘casey’ replied with the following statement in a thread where individuals were trying to debug the issue:

Hi everyone,

We’d like to thank you for your patience through the recent change made to the RSS Feed links that has impacted some of you, and apologize for the delayed response on the boards as well as the lack of a proactive message to announce this change. There was some miscommunication here on when this change was planned to roll out. Essentially we updated the links in the RSS Feeds to reflect the new link generator structure which we implemented a while back. This new link structure includes added parameters that we plan to use for some optimization initiatives to further enhance our tools and most importantly help generate higher earnings for our partners.

We believe the third party tools being used to publish content from the ePN RSS Feeds will update as necessary, if not already, to account for this new link structure and direct users to the correct pages on eBay. Also, as recommended by others in this thread it’s a good idea to consult the resources available through these third parties for further assistance. Please note that there are no issues with the RSS Feed URLs and links when taken directly from the publisher interface.

Thanks again for your patience,

Casey

You can read the full thread here. So it definitely looks like there are some serious backend changes in the works. I’ll be slowly (or quickly depending on when they enforce the change) converting my rover links to follow these new variables. The BANS issue may have been related to urlencoding, not sure.

Incoming search terms:

php money codes
php money code

So you messed up, now what?

admin — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:12:18 +0000

I pretty much try to avoid the official EPN forum these days. The amount of negative, paranoid and panicky posts there can sometimes freak you out. But, those posts are real and should be looked at on occasion to understand how series EPN is about violations.

I’m still trying to diversify my affiliate marketing pie and get EPN more in the balance by promoting heavily with Amazon and CJ products over the last few months. In fact, I just recently did some new EPN development for the first time last week. During this development phase I clicked on a rover link to test that the proper CampID was being sent and I was landing at the appropriate listing. The next day, I purchased something on eBay and realized that I just purchased an item after dropping my rover cookie on my machine. Normally, I do eBay purchases on another box that has none of my affiliate cookies (or clear my cookies). Not doing any EPN development for a while, I forgot about the rover. Total rookie mistake on my part.

I’m sure a lot of people do this, intentionally or not intentionally, but I didn’t want to be one of those users at the EPN forum complaining that I can’t log in, or that I’ve been booted from the program without any reasons, etc. I decided to take a proactive approach and contact EPN and let them know what I’ve done, and request that transaction be removed from my earnings.

After submitting my email (via their Contact/Help form in the ‘Can I test my own links?’ section) I received the classic ‘canned’ message stating that they’ve forwarded my email to the Network Quality team at EPN. I didn’t get a response for about a week, but then finally received a great email from the Quality Team, thanking me for being proactive and notifying them of the accidental click. The letter stated that this would not be a problem (this time) and request that I be sure to clear cookies before making any future purchases at eBay. No problem!

Nothing probably would have happened if I didn’t send them a email. This was the first and only time I’ve purchased someting on my rover cookie, but you never know. I’d hate to lose my EPN account over simple purchase at eBay.

Use Live HTTP Headers to verify your EPN links are working

admin — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 01:52:38 +0000

I’ve been seeing a lot of complaining, specifically on the EPN forum about impressions and clicks not tracking. Lots of whining and basically ill feelings directed towards eBay’s programmers. Being a programmer, I feel for them. I do however agree with some of the issues, specifically the lack of validation of input fields. This lack of validation is allowing users to input incorrect data for their widgets. Though, I feel for the people that are missing clicks and impressions because of this… I have to say, “Why don’t you inspect your links after you’ve built them?????” It’s really easy to double check your work and verify that it looks correct.

One tool that’s been essential for me is Live HTTP Headers plugin for FireFox. Basically, it’s a packet sniffer for your browser. It will display the requests and responses between the browser and the server. This is really useful if you mask your links and want to ensure that they’re going to the right place AND passing the correct data.

Just turn this plugin on and start clicking your Editor Kits and direct links. Look for GET /rover/ requests, make sure your campid is NOT a word, and is a 10 digit numeric value, compare that value with your campaign list at EPN. Make sure you see customid and toolid variables WITH values next to them. Simple tests with this should ensure that the link is built correct. Next make a note of when you clicked this link, and watch for it in your reports or dashboard.

Paying attention and being thorough with your link work will go a long long way. I’ve been seeing lots of invalid campids out there (ie: campid=JOHN SMITH). If you’re campid is bad, you won’t track and you won’t make any commissions on them.

Also, pay attention to your CJ account, and watch clicks in there. If you see clicks for eBay on sites you converted, that means you’ve missed a link somewhere.

Hope this helps!
hanji

Dynamically create eBay widgets from existing rover code

admin — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 22:40:22 +0000

Today, I read about the eBay widget. At first I was super stoked on the concept, and they look great. Here is a working example of the widget:

Now my issue is this, it seems like you might be missing out on cookies since visitors might be viewing all the auction info directly from the widget vs going to eBay, and you would missing out on the cookie and affliate tracking. My initial tests with FireFox and Live HTTP headers seem to stress that cookie generation only occurs when you click ‘View & Bid’ in the widget. The jury is still out on this, and hopefully people will share some of their success and failures to help others make good decisions when it comes to the widget. I’m going to try to post any useful results as they occur.

In the meantime, I thought I’d give up this simple little function that will convert inputted rover code into the widget. This could be useful if you have content stored in the database with rover code embedded. You’ll need to download the swfobject.js file to help with IE browsers display object/embed tags.

define("PID", "123456790");
function convertEbayNew($inLink){
$showWidget    = true;
$out = $inLink;
if(eregi("(.*cgi.ebay.com.*)",$inLink)){
$itemID   = ”;
$arr = explode(‘QQ’,$inLink);
if(sizeof($arr) > 0){
for($x = 0; $x < sizeof($arr); $x++){
if(ereg(‘(^itemZ)’,$arr[$x])){
$item    = explode(‘itemZ’,$arr[$x]);
if(is_numeric($item[1])){
$itemID   = $item[1];
}
unset($item);
}
}
unset($arr);
}
if($showWidget){
if(strlen(trim($itemID)) > 0){
$xid = substr(md5(uniqid(rand(),1)),0,8);
$out = ‘
’;
}
}
}
return $out;
}
?>

echo convertEbayNew($link);?>

It’s pretty simple, and you could easily expand this to auto generate widgets in a forum (hint, look at preg_replace_callback()). If you have any thoughts, please comment here. There is also a DigitalPoint thread here that has a dicussion about this now.