WordBay WordPress plugin - FREE! Create eBay listings quickly and easily.

If you weren't following the progress of WordBay in another thread, in brief: WordBay is an extension for WordPress which is intended to make it very quick and simple to create lots of pages in WordPress containing eBay product listings - and of course to earn from them by inserting your EPN Campaign ID! In other words, you can have a niche site up and running in minutes!

Well, as threatened, and after way too much time spent on it, WordBay is now a "proper" WordPress plugin! If you would like to beta test this, please download from here and let me know how you get on - if there are any bugs (naaaa, surely not) or any features you think are essential, I would be VERY glad to hear from you.

WordBay is still free to use (though not GNU/GPL until I make a proper release version). There is a revenue sharing option for you generous webmasters out there, though. So get to it!

 

Thanks man.
I will be trying it.

 

thanks for the plugin! I will definitely try it out on my blogs. I am currently using BayRSS on my blogs. Here's an example: http://bestdigitalcameraadvice.com

Of course I had to pay for this plugin...it wasn't free!!

It will be interesting to compare the 2 plugins.

By the way, somewhere on this post, someone was recommending ABB. This is a plugin that pulls in products from CJ.com into a WP blog. Personally I never had much success with CJ.com...not too sure why. It just doesn't convert well for me.

Kerry

 

I haven't checked out all the alternatives to my plugin, I kind of just kind of built it up primarily for my own use initially. BayRSS certainly looks to produce a similar effect. I wonder if I can better it, and make it free too Let me know of any functionality you would find useful.

I never had any great luck with CJ either. Maybe it's because there are so many relatively unknown retailers on there - people are still basically most trusting of the big boys like eBay and Amazon. Though of course all that vastly depends on your site too...

This eBay approach has its downside in that you are pretty reliant on search engine traffic, and when you get fluctuations like I have the last couple of day, some sites practically stop getting traffic overnight (hopefully to rebound soon...)

 

Hey mark, did you manage to intergrate a search function into the plugin?

 

Hi mate. Yes, indeed I did - only in this "official plugin" version, though I do want to "retro-fit" the old template extension too, for anyone who wants to keep using that. Have a look at http://itsgottabered.com/testbed to see the new version. This is JUST my site for testing, so you can fiddle with it all you like and try to break it You'll see there is a special page made (called "Product Search" in this particular case, but you can call it what you like) which is both a search page and search results page. When you use the search box at the bottom it lands you on a results page within your own site.

Have a play and let me know what you think. I am away for 10 days on a trip so when I get, if I see there are no major bug reports or essential new feature requests I will do a proper release, with instructions and everything!

 

Your site isn't loading for me mark. Tried the download link and the test page, they're not working.

 

yes, 'fraid the same for me Mark

 

There was a bit of downtime earlier on, should be working now. I am pretty happy with Bluehost, but this was one of the rare outages probably...

 

Loving the search box in this plugin, nicely done.

One tip i reccommend doing though is to place buy.php in the root folder and then editing wordbay.php where it says:

$buyurl = get_bloginfo ( 'wpurl' ) .
                                        "/wp-content/plugins/WordBay/buy.php?";

Code (markup):

and change to:

$buyurl = get_bloginfo ( 'wpurl' ) .
                                        "/buy.php?";

Code (markup):

Then the URLs will look like:

http://your-site.com/buy.php?buyurl=***

And not like:

http://your-site.com/wp-content/plugins/WordBay/buy.php?buyurl=***

That's just how i prefer it anyway.

 

Good tip Synchronize!

Can I ask what version of WP you are using? I'm using 2.5 and have a few 'quirks' with the plugin, namely when I have it activated I don't see any posts or text on the other pages but when i deactivate it, the text appears... it's very puzzling

 

Ok yea i just noticed this myself, very strange. I didn't notice before because i've been testing the plugin on a domain with no content. But i am too experiencing the same issue.

I think we're gonna have to wait for mark to get back from his trip.

 

Greetings from Holland! Yes, unfortunately I can't do much till I get back ,haven't brought any of my files with me! But will look into that bug, and also at moving the buy.php file. The main reason for that being in the plugins directory was simply to make it easy for beginners to just put everything in the same directory, but I guess this wouldn't be too tricky...

 

so... any news? it's a little buggy the plugin. some of my pages disapear after activated...
I hope you can fix that.

 

Hey Kerry could you tell me please where I can find the "ABB" that you are talking about? It works with any cj affiliate?

 

Hi guys, I am back from holiday and will try to look at the issues as soon as possible. This bug with pages disappearing - do you mean they disappear from the side menu, or that the content on them disappears? Also, does it happen intermittently, or does it ALWAYS happen with certain pages, or perhaps certain keyword combinations?

All this info would help track down the bug and maybe help me to reproduce it and get rid of it.

Just a reminder, this is, as stated, a beta version, so your feedback is very valuable, but please don't go creating any huge eBay affiliate empires with it until we get things ironed out!

Back soon.

 

make it geographically targetted if possible.

 

I am definitely thinking about this - it is certainly an option for a future version. I would like to have it too! You know geo-targetting is not a completely exact science, so not everyone will want to use it, but the benefits may outweigh the disadvantages.

 

It occurs as soon as you activate the plugin. You'll be able to use the plugin and list items as usual, but any previous posts with content will disappear. Only the post titles are visible. The posts titles are visible on the sidebar, it's what's in the posts that disappear.

 

Aha... Do you mean POSTS specifically, or pages and posts? Sounds as though I have forgotten to pass through the content when there are NO WordBay tags - doh! Yes, I think I know what's happened. Will try to straighten it out asap and post a new version. Might be another 24hrs though. Thanks for the feedback.