Thalasar Ventures

As promised this the first part on my series on how to build a shopping application like Best Buys Zone United Kingdom. I suspect building a mashup will only get easier in the future. The recent introduction of Google’s My Maps I suspect that it’s only a matter of time before there are easier ways to build a mashup than the way I am going to show you. The great thing about this approach is that ANYONE who is comfortable with basic web hosting should be able to do it.
There are some basic things that you can do to prepare for building your own shopping comparison like Best Buy UK.

There are some basic things that you can do to prepare for building your own shopping comparison like Best Buy UK.

1. Open an Amazon Affiliate Account
2. Open a Commission Junction Account (Join both EBay and Ebay.co.uk affiliate programs)
3. Open an AuctionAds account.
4. Open a Shopping.com account. Please note you can join the UK affiliate program as well if you have United Kingdom sites.

   Here are the tools I used to build Best Buys Zone UK. You are gonna need them and most of them have free downloads (they only cost a few bucks) and they will enable you to open multiple shopping comparison and affiliate sites.
   Associate-O-Matic
   Associate-O-Matic is an Amazon Store Builder script built by Justin Meecham of Gyrofly.com. It’s a fully customizable and quite powerful store builder for building stand alone Amazon stores. I used it for Best Buy UK because the recent 3.0 version of the software allows you to access the variables used in the script and use them in external PHP programs and then call them within the framework of the Associate-O-Matic script. That’s a very useful feature and it’s one that allows us to use Associate-O-Matic as a framework for the whole application. It’s important to remember a couple of things Associate-O-Matic is just the framework for the application. It’s also one of the revenue streams. You will need an Amazon affiliate id in order to be paid by Amazon. Associate-O-Matic costs $99 with a $20 annual upgrade fee. It’s also a closed source application but Justin has done a great job of making it incredibly easy to configure and customize. Trust me you can spend hours working with it to get an application to look just so. Also note that a single license of Associate-O-Matic can be installed on as many web sites as you want. Additionally it works on every localized version of Amazon.
   CaRP – Caching RSS Process
   CaRP is one of the essential tools in any affiliate marketers tool kit. I prefer CaRP over Magpie and other RSS to HTML scripts because it’s easily configurable and more importantly it caches results. CaRP is a PHP based program that displays RSS as HTML. This is critical because this allows us to add Ebay auctions and have the content indexed by search engines. This means CaRP has one advantage over AuctionAds – the content will be indexed by the search engines. CaRP allows us to display any RSS based content – combine that with Associate-O-Matic and you can theme RSS feeds around a product. You can also use CaRP in your blog or other website to feature syndicated content or auctions from Ebay. You can use the Ebay RSS generator to generate RSS feeds with your affiliate PID (Commission Junction) and display them on your web site.
   Make sure you have a hosting account
   I realize this seems sorta obvious that you need a hosting account but you are gonna need one. This won’t work without hosting. So make sure you have your hosting account setup.
   The next steps are pretty simple.

   1. Download Associate-O-Matic
   2. Extract Associate-O-Matic locally since it comes as zip file. Remember where you extracted it.
   3. Download CaRP
   4. Extract CaRP locally since it comes as zip file. Remember where you extracted it.

   In the next post in this series I will cover uploading and getting application running. Then I will cover how to best integrate them.

   Posts in this series.
   How to build an cool shopping application. No programming required. Part One.
   How to build an cool shopping application. No programming required. Part Two.
   How to build an cool shopping application. No programming required. Part Three.