CJ encourages on its front/main affiliate page: Boost Your Revenue and Develop Applications with Web Services! Information about Web Services is available at webservicesdotcjdotcom (I can't type in live links yet) I have been an affiliate with CJ since 1999. My technical skills are mainly Html and CSS. I plan to learn PHP and MySQL. What skills should an affiliate have in order to benefit from this new program? Is Commission Junction's Web Services too technically advanced for an affiliate like myself or not? Would it be worth it for me to register for this CJ program that might incur fees (sooner or later)? My reservations are due to the fact that in order to take advantage of the Web Services, I must register with a special form and CJ's TOS explicitly says: 4. Fees and Payments. "CJ reserves the right to charge fees for future use of or access to the CJ APIs in CJ's sole discretion, and any such charges will be disclosed to you prior." I'm afraid that they will start to charge me before I gain a monetary benefit from this I understand that this service is currently free but #4 from the TOS would let CJ charge for the service at any future given point. At that point could a webmaster opt out or would he/she be stuck with paying CJ a fee? Any thoughts or opinions? Thanks in advance.
I'm wondering why I haven't received a response? Is there a lack of responses because you all have signed up for it and love it? Or is the response due to lack of interest/curiosity? Or do you all feel that CJ's Web Services program is buggy? Has anyone tried CJ's new program?
I'm guessing the lack of responses is due to the fact that we don't yet know... Web services is very new. You might try the programming forum for help on the API programming. As for charging people... my guess is that's just lawyers covering CJ's asses. I don't see them charging for this any time soon. T
Hi, I doubt CJ will charge from publishers to use webservices. They might do something like they have for datafeeds - $250 one time fee, but is waived if you made atleast $300(not sure about the exact figure.) I have used their ws. It seems like it is still under development and they don't have all the advertisers signed up for it. It seems like a good alternate once it is mature and functionally rich.
Thanks, TheGuy, I appreciated your post. I was not aware that some advertisers had not yet signed on to Web Services. Since CJ charges for the datafeeds (and the "waiver qualifications" were always too high for me -- I think CJ is ripping off publishers for charging for feeds) I would bet that sooner or later CJ would charge for the Web Services. If working knowledge of MySQL and PHP are required in order to use the Web Services, I'm not at that point yet.
I would say just PHP. They also provide sample code. It took me about 30 - 45 minutes to create a search engine using CJ's ws which searches the products their advertisers have.
I'm using $GET to snag variables and basic array looping to display results. This is all level 1 php stuff. Brandon
CJ webservice is pretty straight forward to use although I have found some inconsistent results when passing certain parameters to filter the results. I put up a demo at http://demo.mikecostello.net/ajax/cj/ you can play around with to see what kind of data is available . Its far from complete but I think you will get the point. Just email me if you have any technical questions.
I have plan, to make CJ Webservice from Nusoap feed to RSS feed, but some time CJ Server responding to slow.
CJ webservices is easy to implement, however, it is too buggy at the moment for any serious use. For example, the same product from the same advertiser may appear several times in the keyword search results. using sku, isbn or ean may circumvent this, but this time most advertisers don't provide this data.
I guess this would depend on how you use it, what your needs are, and how you define "serious". I'm doing okay with it now. Here's an example. http://www.recordingreview.com/soundcard/Digidesign/Mbox_2_USB/reviews.php Look at the box that says "Digidesign Mbox 2 USB Audio/MIDI Pro Tools LE Interface". That is the CJ ad. It seams to be working well. I have my script setup to display Adsense if CJ can't find anything. In the future, I'll have to build a scraper to snag the titles from CJ.com and then build the products around that. Brandon