Note: something weird happened with version numbers here, we already had a v0.999, but for some reason the WordPress repository wasn’t updated, so I am not sure what happened. Just pretend this is v0.999 anyway and replace your previous version.
Available through the Download link now.
Note, this version will slightly “break” your old 0.998 or previous version, by reverting your product category to “All categories” - no big deal, but you do need to act quickly to get it working exactly how you want.
This version finally deals with the issue of differing eBay category numbers for each country site. Now when you go into the back-end you will see this (click to enlarge):
It is a list of eBay country sites, with a field to insert a product category code by each one (all defaulted to -1 = All categories). Yes, if you want to specify a category for your listings you will need to insert the equivalent code for each country, using the list that I have linked to for each country. If you are not geotargetting then you only need to do this for the country you are targetting with your “listings site” setting, not for all.
Was there any simpler way of doing this? Well, no, not without using the eBay API, and I’m afraid I can’t do that with a free program like WordBay.
My recommendation, despite this big change to the back-end, is: don’t bother with this, leave them all, or mostly on “-1” and just be very judicious with your choice of keywords. Your keyword “cream cheese dispenser” will not yield many results on Swedish eBay anyway, never mind if you try to limit the category! Also, as explained in the backend, the countries listed in brackets (which now also include Hong Kong and Singapore which were recently discontinued) are NOT available through EPN anyway, so be aware of these limitations of using geotargetting! As I have said before, visitors from some countries may very well get no results at all, while non-EPN sites will get your traffic without paying you any commission, so use at your discretion.
Let me know if everything is working fine (as I know you will) and apologies for not having added any of the other functionality people have asked about. I am really trying to get the major quirks out so I can finally call it v1.0!
Posted on February 13th, 2009 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized
Nice, i’ve upgraded and so far it’s running smoothly.
One idea i think would be worth implementing is making all the items open in a new window using target=”_blank”. I think it would help alot as it keeps the user on your site so they can keep browsing.
Hi, thanks for the feedback. Yes, I think that is one for the next version, just a tick box for if you want the page to open in a new browser or not. I will put it on the (growing) list! Though that’s very easy to implement, so shouldn’t be a problem.
Hi. Me again. I had the issue (which seems cleared up now) on my bicycle site with the [wordbay]bicycles[/wordbay] appearing as a page constant. That issue resolved itself (somehow). I started seeing the same thing on my wedding blog. So, I did a bit of digging.
As you may recall, using Exec-PHP and this bit of code
?php if ($_GET[’WBsearch’] == NULL) {
echo ‘[wordbay]wedding[/wordbay]’;
} ?
I was able to use the same page for both the initial auction page as well as the search results page (saves having that extra page hanging around).
What I noticed this time was I left the ‘/’ at the end of the search page URL. Apparently, you must have code in there to check the current page and make sure it’s not the search page? (I’ll have to look closer at this). Once I removed the ‘/’ from the end of the search page URL, everything worked fine again (i.e. - I could use the same store page as the search results page, and the constant “[wordbay]” values no longer showed up).
=======================================
Another suggestion for an addition (in addition to the request in the first comment) - a tracking ID.
Thanks,
Wally
Oh, almost forgot. Would it be possible to store the CSS values somewhere else than in the plugin folder. I always forget to update the CSS whenever the plugin is upgraded.
Thanks!
Hi Walt,
Thanks for your feedback as ever. I will have to have a look at that code - I must admit, I did not get round to seeing how you had resolved this question of the search page. However, the reason I created a separate search page was that I was concerned about confusing WP with extra GET parameters on a regular page, esp. where someone may not be using SEF urls, so they have blabla.com/?p=127 (or whatever), and then… I am not 100% sure what happens if I tack &WBSearch= on the end of that. Actually, I never tried, maybe it works fine. I will try that, but not many people seemed bothered about it…
As for you other question, YES! It’s a royal pain in the … when it resets your colours every time. Actually, at the very least I should leave the CSS out of the next release, since I am not currently making any changes to it. But the colour selection in the backend definitely occurred to me - about the 10th time I overwrote my own CSS, I think it was…
Anyway, thanks again for the feedback and apologies for not being very quick about getting back for the most part - wayyyyy too much going on…
Not working ebay was displaying ok now today many do not display at all ..
Hi, hard to say what the problem might be without more information. All I can say is that my sites seem to be working fine. Consider the following possibilities:
- eBay feed is screwing up. Not sure how often that happens, but there’s nothing much we can do about it when it does.
- you haven’t specified a (valid) category number for the country you are listing, especially if you have switched on geotargetting and it is trying to show results for your country.
- some obvious mistake with keywords. Try copy/paste of the exact keywords you are using into the search for the eBay site you are targetting and see what it comes up with.
Sorry I can’t help more, but please double-check your settings, and if it’s eBay playing up, maybe it’s fixed itself by now. I should emphasise that there is nothing I can do to the program that would stop it working all of a sudden, unless you installed a different version - but this one is currently stable AFAIK and has not been updated in a few weeks now.
Hi,
Is it possible to specify multiple categories for a country? For example sporting goods + powersports? like what you can do for specifying specific seller’s (by putting commas).
It would be great if we can do that.