WordBay


The quickest way to start earning from Wordpress and eBay!

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  • Error: value “” is out of range. (10008)

    value “” is out of range. (10008)

    Quite a few people have been getting this error (though not me, so far) and I am at a bit of a loss to explain it. There is no decent documentation on the feed from eBay so I fear there is no easy way to find out what is going on. At the moment I am inclined to blame eBay as I have seen the error happening with other plugins too (I think I happened on a phpBay site with the issue), but it could be some weird combination of the choice of keywords, category or even hosting server causing the problem - seems to happen consistently only to some people. It’s really annoying, of course, and I will make it a priority to find a workaround for this before adding any new bells and whistles to WordBay.

    Posted on November 21st, 2008 by markowe
    Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

    WordBay - quick guide to editing CSS

    Just to let you know I have done what I should have done ages ago and written a brief explanation of how to customise the WordBay display by tinkering with the CSS. Though some people have done amazing jobs in customising the plugin, it can be a bit confusing. Have a look at the quick guide here and let me know if there is anything I have left out (no-o-o, surely not).

    Posted on November 21st, 2008 by markowe
    Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

    NEW VERSION: v0.998 - timeout errors resolved, added options

    Go and get the new version of WordBay, v0.998 (oh, so close!) The following issues have been resolved and functionality added:

    - geotargetting timeout errors resolved (we hope). Thanks to Jez for this solution. The problem before was that users were reporting occasional timeouts when geotargetting was switched on and the HostIP server happened to be working sluggishly (not that common, but still…) But now, hopefully, if the HostIP server takes longer than 2 seconds to respond (should be long enough) then WordBay will just revert to the default country, rather than hang up or produce an error. Let us know if it is working, because HostIP has been working fine, so we haven’t been able to test it.

    - nice “mouse-over” effects added. A user requested this and it was pretty easy to implement so thought I would add it. Now in the back-end, under Display options, you can choose to have the whole background of an item change colour when you move the mouse over it, and change back when you move off it. This will only work if you specify both a “Mouse not over” and a “Mouse over” colour. Additionally, you should make sure that the “Mouse not over” colour is the same as that specified in your CSS file for .firstlocaleitem background-color, otherwise when you move over it will change colour and then change back to a different colour than what it was, which you don’t want, I imagine.

    - buy.php can be relocated and renamed. This was something I’ve been meaning to do for ages and since a user mentioned it again recently I thought it was high time. In Display options you can now specify the exact path to your buy.php file and change its location, as well as its name. So for example, you could move it to the root of your domain and call it shop.php. In that case, you will specify the full path as: http://mydomain.com/shop.php. Makes it look neater than: mydomain.com/wp-content/plugins/wordbay/buy.php and there may be a footprint issue too, where search engines start spotting the “buy.php” pattern, though that’s getting a bit paranoid in my opinion! Just remember to use the full path as I have demonstrated above. If you leave the field empty then it will continue to use the buy.php file located in your plugins/wordbay directory. One concern with this is if we ever change anything in the buy.php file (not planning to, but who knows…) then you will need to remember to copy the new one to where you have moved it.

    Well, I am sure you will be only-too-prepared to let me know if anything is awry with this version :) Keep on earning with EPN, won’t you!

    Posted on November 17th, 2008 by markowe
    Filed under: Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

    NEW VERSION: v0.997 - critical-ish geo-targetting bug fixed

    If you haven’t already done so, please download the new version of WordBay. This is mostly important if you have been using geo-targetting as there was a pretty critical bug in v0.996 which managed to elude us for a whole month (geo-targetting is tricky to debug because you can’t go to India to test it!) - thanks to the users who spotted the problem. Namely, the geo-targetting was correctly identifying the visitor’s country but screwing up the dispatch location for items. So if they came from Belgium, they might get US-based items, or in some cases nothing at all. This is now fixed, and a new option added in the admin back-end - you can now choose whether the geo-targetting code will override your default dispatch country or not. You may not want it to do so - perhaps you are dealing in speciality items dispatched from Turkmenistan, and you want all visitors to see these, regardless of where they come from! More likely though, you are using “Any country” to expand your listings, and don’t want non-default country visitors being given limited listings just from their locale.

    Just to add, I also added an id to the search box div so there is now a style for this in the CSS file. Someone complained that their search box was not showing, despite being present in the HTML. Probably the div is inheriting a setting from another div - maybe it has 0 height or something. So if you are having problems like this, or want to change the style of the search box you can do so by adding settings to the #WBsearchbox style, though I have not actually added any styling myself.

    This also brings up another topic, namely that of html validity. I have read some complaints that the html of WordBay is pretty ropey. Yes, it’s terrible, I freely admit. And because the data is dynamically generated, if you have 20 eBay items then these errors get multiplied. I will do my best to improve validity in a future version - probably I can make it “almost valid”, though of course I do not know what doctype you are using in your template. I haven’t decided which to use myself - probably not XHTML 1.0 Transitional as this has some limitations…

    Anyway, keep earning with eBay, WordPress and WordBay and a big thanks to the users who have cut me in a little bit using the revenue sharing option I left open - otherwise I would have ditched development on this long ago probably.

    Posted on October 20th, 2008 by markowe
    Filed under: Uncategorized | 16 Comments »

    How is geo-targetting for you?

    The geo-targetting version of WordBay has been around for a few weeks now, so I just wondered how this is performing for you, if you are using it.

    To be honest I have so far only had one sale where I could definitely put it down to the geo-targetting doing its work - a UK sale on a page I know defaults to US - but the vast majority of my search traffic is from the US anyway, so I think it’s more to do with that. Still, it would be cool to get a sale or two from Hong Kong or Spain just so I knew it was worth it!

    Let me know how you are doing!

    Posted on October 9th, 2008 by markowe
    Filed under: Uncategorized | 9 Comments »

    v.0.996 - minor bugs removed

    I probably should have suggested you wait a day or two after I put out the new version of WordBay - these more major changes always result in some niggly little bugs creeping in. Thanks to people who sent in bug reports for the recent version over the last couple days. I am trying to reach a stable version of this geotargetting verison, so we can round things of to a nice round version 1!

    This latest version (download link on the left, as ever) includes the fix to the bug which caused the US site ID not to be displayed in the drop-down menu (!) and also to the annoying “Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by…” error, almost invariably caused by some stray spaces after the “?>” in the php file. With that fixed, I hope v0.996 is now working as advertised…!

    Posted on September 21st, 2008 by markowe
    Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

    Updated 0.995 version - USA now included :)

    Apologies to all those who were hoping to use WordBay with US eBay (now why would you want to do that?) - a little omission in this new version caused the US Site ID option not to appear in the drop-down list! Rather inconvenient. I have now corrected this, but have NOT advanced the version number - so you should just redownload the plugin, and just overwrite the WordBay.php file with this new version.

    Sorry about that - getting my head around the country options has been something of a trial… Keep any bug reports coming in!

    Posted on September 20th, 2008 by markowe
    Filed under: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

    New version: 0.995 - improved country-handling

    No sooner had I put out the geotargetting version of WordBay than it was time for another small update. If you are happy with the way WordBay displays listings for your chosen country, and you are not using geotargetting, don’t bother with this update. Otherwise, download here.

    This update is only for you if you want to display Swedish listings (which you may do even if you are not Swedish but are using geotargetting) and listings from a couple of other countries that I think I may have left out in the previous version, that are not actually IN the EPN program.

    Please read this discussion about eBay country locales as relates to EPN for more information. Remember in particular that if you are using geotargetting, and your visitor is served Swedish, Austrian, German and some other country listings you will not earn any commission as these sites are not part of the EPN program. If people really begrudge eBay the free traffic I will think of a way to stop these being displayed.

    Posted on September 20th, 2008 by markowe
    Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

    A discussion of eBay sites and the EPN program

    I am currently working on making WordBay fully consistent with the different language and country options available through the eBay Partner Network, which it may not have been before. I was as confused as anybody, but I think I have unravelled most of the threads, and can present an explanation of eBay country sites as related to the EPN program, and its use with WordBay - please note though that I will implement the full range of country options in versions post-v0.99.

    These are the sites available through the EPN program, and I believe that on application to EPN you would normally tick all of these countries, though I don’t know if it is possible to be accepted for some but rejected for others:

    United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Belgium, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, eBay Motors (the latter functions a bit like a country site but is not applied for separately)

    These are all fully-functioning (I hope!) in the WordBay options.

    Non-EPN eBay sites

    However, there are other international eBay sites which are NOT accessible through EPN. So you will not earn any commissions with them if you choose them as options. These eBay sites are also divided into two groups which I’ll explain in a second:

    Group 1: Germany, China, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland

    Group 2: Malaysia, Taiwan, Philippines, Poland, Sweden

    Of these, it is possible that even though you can choose one of these as your default listings site in WordBay, you actually won’t be served any listings. I cannot be sure which these are - I have not managed to get China and Taiwan to work, for example, I don’t even know if they are fully-fledged eBay sites, I include all of these for the sake of completeness and we may remove them at a later date for reasons explained below. These non-EPN countries are shown in brackets in the drop-down option lists in WordBay (in post v0.99 versions).

    In addition, Group 2 sites do not even have a so-called “Placement ID” (which I’ve called “referral locale” in WordBay) with which to refer the user to the relevant site, so I have not included these in the referral locale drop-down list in WordBay admin.

    Country sites and geotargetting

    There is one corollary of this if you are using the geotargetting option in WordBay - have you spotted it?

    If you have geo-targetting switched on and you get a visitor coming from a country with a non-EPN site, like Sweden, say, they will be served Swedish eBay listings, but you will not receive any commissions for sales made by eBay. However, this is a small price to pay - do we really hope that a Swedish visitor will go and join US eBay and start buying from there if only we were to serve them US eBay listings? Not worth the worry in my opinion. Unless you REALLY resent eBay earning any money from you without paying you a commission!

    More seriously, if someone is visiting from China, or one of the other eBay locations that do not seem to provide a product feed, well… they’ll get an empty page, for now. Again, are you that bothered about this? If so, I will try to think of some way to get around this in future versions, probably simply by eliminating those countries, once we have identified them. If you want to do remove any countries yourself - easy, just delete the rows pertaining to those countries in the countries.txt file that comes with WordBay. Then when a visitor comes from those countries they will simply receive listings from the default country.

    I hope that goes some way to clearing things up if you were confused about this, and I would be happy to hear any more insights into this issue!

    Posted on September 20th, 2008 by markowe
    Filed under: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

    WordBay 0.99 - now with geotargetting!

    After something of a lull in the development of WordBay - partly because of worries about the EPN program, but also mainly due to summer - I can announce a new version! Thanks to the help of Jez Hopkins, who kindly supplied the essential bit of code, WordBay now offers geotargetting - a much-requested option!

    So what are you waiting for - go to your backend and update the WordBay plugin, or download it and install manually from here!

    By default, geotargetting is switched OFF in the backend, so you have to check the box if you want to use it. If switched on, the plugin will attempt to determine the geographic location of your visitor and display listings (and a “sign-up” link if you have that option switched on) for the relevant country, hopefully increasing the number of potential customers and therefore sales! If the geo-option is not switched on, it will display the country options you have specified in your backend as default.

    NOTE: This will not apply if you are using UK or US eBay and most other major eBay sites, but we made some changes to the country options while we were implementing geotargetting and it is possible that your country has disappeared off the list in the backend! Sorry about this! My next job is to revise the country data and provide a FULL list of ALL countries available through the EPN program. So if your country has disappeared from the backend, please roll back to the previous version of WordBay and hang in there for a few more days while I get that right.

    A warning about geotargetting!

    Use geotargetting at your own “risk” - the free ip database at hostip.info is bound to have some wrong matches in it, which will cause the wrong country to be displayed in some indeterminate (though probably tolerably small) number of cases. Also, we have been unable to test the targetting for all locales (just can’t find that Belgian proxy!) so please test this out for yourself, maybe use a specially created campaign ID for a couple of days and make sure your stats are showing the right country.

    I personally think it is worth the risk of displaying the wrong eBay site on occasion if it means a good number of new potential customers.

    So thanks once again Jez for the help!

    Other minor improvements

    • changed the action of the “…or click here to see similar items” link - this was basically serving no purpose before and usually just showed the same items. It now takes only the first 2 search terms from your keywords and searches on those. This should broaden the search, but it is still pretty clumsy - need a better suggestion - maybe pagination would be a solution in the future
    • fixed the bug I flagged up the other day, where complex queries with quotation marks in them were returning empty results. Not sure when that error crept in, but I HAD heard of “urlencode” before, so not sure what happened there…

    Let me know how you get on with this version, and remember the current golden rule of eBay affiliate marketing: “thin is NOT in“.

    Posted on September 20th, 2008 by markowe
    Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

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