[Tracy]

I love direct product links! Every time I switch an Advertiser to products instead of just banners, I seen an improvement in sales.

Last night I spent the entire evening updating a page because a lot of the products had been discontinued or were unavailable. I had to check each link, one-by-one to see if the product was still for sale at the advertiser's site.

Does anybody have any ideas or solutions on how to speed up this process? Wouldn't it be lovely if there was a program out there that checked your site and reported back to you any items that were not available? Or is such a program already available?

Every time I add a new page to my site, I'm adding more individual product links. This makes it increasingly more difficult to keep up with them all.

Thanks for your input.

Tracy

[Ebudae]

Hi Tracy. I was having the same problem with one of my merchants too.

What I have done is to show some of the products in a certian catagory - like blue widgets. Say some wonderful things about blue widgets. Then link to the individual product page of all the blue widgets.

What I am hoping is that way some sort of blue widget will always be in stock and they may see more varieties they might like as well (ie light blue widgets)

What I am trying is a test to see how well it works, will let you know it turns out good. If anyone has more ideas, would love to hear them!!

Vicki [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

[webmarm]

I do that a lot, too, Vicki. I use a few direct product links, but this is a relatively new thing for me, so I haven't seen how it will affect upkeep yet.

[Andy Rodriguez]

Hi Tracy,

Tiger affiliates have been experiencing that challenge as well. We are actively writing code to have the out of stock products automaticaly re-direct to the main category pages. You may have your other merchants do as well. It's a bit of work on the merchants end, but well worth it IMO.

Also, we have recently made available to affiliates a "data feed" that basically is what our system uses to feed and populate our website. That has all the in-stock products and can be given to any website that requests it. It will only be of use though to a database driven affiliate website. You may want to ask your merchants if they can provide that to you as well.

Hope this helps ....

[ 02-05-2002: Message edited by: Andy - TigerDirect ]