I'm trying to make my own link generator in php for my site. I started out doing thinking no prob until I noticed... Buy.com has a different AID# for different products! There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it either. What do you do in that case? The whole point of the link generator is so that I don't have to look everything up all the time. I had planned to use Buy.com a lot. If you use an AID# number that belongs to Buy.com, but is different than what they give you at CJ.com for a specific product are you going to lose the commission? This makes the prospect of designing a link creator/replacer a little daunting to say the least.
Assign different id's to them with another php-script which loads them into a database? But maybe I haven't understood you completely..
Hmmm... I'm already using a database table to handle the auto renaming scheme. I don't know anyone's feeling here, but is using the CJ API to look up every AID# going to slow things down to a crawl? My original plan was to use one AID per merchant. I suppose it isn't impossible. to do lookups on ever single product Buy.com (or whoever else does this) offers (on an as needed basis), but wow. What I thought would take 2 days to create is starting to get silly. I suppose time wasted now, is time saved later, but still.
You will not loose your commission if you send your customer and he decide to buy another product there. The only thing that you need to concern about different AIDs for the same advertiser is what is each landing page for each AID - use it in your favor to send the customer to the more relevant landing page possible for that customers so you increase you sales chances.
Thanks Micromag! Noticed this.... http://www.joomlashopbuilder.com/content/view/24/65/ This is a thing for the Joomla CMS that creates links for CJ automatically. user: demo pass: demo To log in. (This may be old hat here, but anyway...) Example link it creates... http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-2223964-10387771?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.buy.com%2Fprod%2Fsm58-lc-cardioid-handheld-dynamic-microphone%2Fq%2Floc%2F111%2F203022428.html No aid# at all! It seems to lack other stuff as well. I assume that works, or whoever is selling it would be in some hot water. So I guess that confirms what you're saying. Though any other comments on this are still welcome.
This redirection feature is very nice, but sadly it is enabled per advertiser and a lot of them keeps it disabled (default value).
Use this commission junction link generator to help you sort out AID and PID fields. Commission Junction is tricky to work with, but it's worth the effort. Ebay is another company with multiple CJ AID's.
You continue to post this thing here.. I already proved that your generator has flaws and should not be used to generate links: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=3169440#7 Use it yourself, but do not tell others to use something that don't work.