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Posts Tagged ‘affiliate news’

Happy 2nd Birthday to the Shopzilla UK Publisher Program

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

Happy Birthday to us!!

March 2011 has seen our 2nd birthday come round in a flash - it’s been a great affiliate 2 years so far, with the program first being launched here in the UK in March 2009.  Not forgetting, of course, Shopzilla US which is also now celebrating Publisher’s 4th birthday this month!! Congratulations to our friends on the other side of the pond!

So since March ‘09, what have we been up to?

Well, we’ve launched our FTP Data Feeds, Dynamic Banners, Catalogue API solution, and we’ve also expanded into both France and Germany. In addition, we’ve had upgrades and updates all over the place, including to the reporting tool, to make the program as great an experience as possible for our much loved affiliates!

Join us in celebrating our 2nd birthday…and here’s to lots more!

©rmansoorian Shopzilla Publisher's 2nd birthday!

©rmansoorian Shopzilla Publisher's 2nd birthday!

Publisher Spotlight: interview with Carl, martial arts expert and owner of shadowhand.com

Thursday, December 10th, 2009
Carl Burgess has been involved in web development for over twelve years as a system administrator, developer, tester and site owner. He is a respected author, teacher and international referee of Taijiquan who likes to push the boundaries of his art and how to disseminate it on the web. Here he talks about his site shadowhand.com and his experience with the Shopzilla UK Publisher Program.

Emma: Hi Carl, first of all, thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to answer our questions. Could you start off by giving us a little introduction about your site?

My site, www.shadowhand.com, has been going for about ten years now and is focussed on the Wudang Style of Taijiquan which is the The martial arts form of T’ai Chi.  I teach from home and decided to start my blog, www.shadowhand.com/blog on how I set up my home dojo. I will start adding my teaching material  at some stage.

Emma: What inspired you to start up the shadowhand blog, why this particular subject?

I have written a book and produced a number of CDs and articles but felt that a more flexible approach was needed to convey what I am doing now.  I generally video my lessons and would like to add commentary and clips on a regular basis rather than taking months to produce a completed full  blown work.

Emma: You’ve been with the Shopzilla UK Publisher Program for a while now – how are you finding it?

It  takes some time to work out how to tailor the ads to your content – i.e what size, colour , shape, orientation etc  so I have been experimenting with all variants to see what works best.
It is good to have a choice of ad type to choose from and be able to configure colours etc.

Emma: I see you’ve added several of our large dynamic assets…how did you find the implementation process?

The Shopzilla system is fairly straightforward to use , the key is to search for your particular subject matter in the BizRate.co.uk site to check on what keywords will find the particular items you want to show and then use those keywords in the Publisher admin to find the appropriate ads. I thought  it was important to match the ads chosen to the particular content  I was writing about to keep it contextual. For example, if I write about boxing gloves, I’ll include an ad showing the gloves, or if you take a look at my headgear post, I’ve integrated an ad displaying items of headguards and head protectors.

Emma: What’s important to you in an affiliate partnership? Are you using any other programs?

Basically good communication, ease of use of the administration system. I am also affiliated with Amazon and Hong Kong Flix. For me, the partnership with Shopzilla’s Publisher program has been a great experience and one that I look forward to continuing.

Emma: How often do you consult our Publisher blog? Do you find it useful in keeping up to date with what’s going on in the Shopzilla Publisher world?

I am a very busy person and so I don’t have much time keeping up with what everyone else is doing. I probably focus about once a month to check up on the statuses of everything.

Emma: And finally…do you have any feedback for us here at Shopzilla i.e. suggestions for improvement?

Maybe some style guidelines for websites which have different layouts i.e. multi-column pages – or perhaps some page templates that fit the ad types might be of help.

Thanks for some great info and feedack, Carl. If you’d like to take a peek at his site, please visit Carl’s  martial arts blog.


Publisher Spotlight: pic2shop has integrated Shopzilla content to supply shopping options on the move

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

Price comparison on the move with pic2shop app. With only 2 and a half years on the international market, Apple’s iPhone has become one of the largest global smartphone companies, accounting for one fifth of total sales. One of the biggest factors behind this has been a nearly 50% year-over-year growth seen in the third quarter of 2009. With this growth comes huge opportunity in the apps or application sector. Apple’s App Store currently has over 100,000 applications available, showing the popularity and growth in the industry. Latching on to a winning concept can result in windfall earnings for any investor, take for example the iFog app. One application that caught our eye recently, was the pic2shop app. Since we are a comparison shopping engine, we are always interested in seeing how the marketplace is evolving. And, as an added bonus, pic2shop has integrated Shopzilla content to supply shopping options to its user base. We caught up with the creator of pic2shop, Benoit Maison, to find out a little more about the application, and his thoughts on the future of smartphone technology.


Diana: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us, Benoit. Tell us a little about pic2shop and exactly what it is.

Benoit: pic2shop is a free iPhone application. It reads barcodes using the iPhone camera, and then looks up and compares prices at online retailers.

Diana: How did the idea come about?

Benoit: It all started as a technical challenge: reading barcodes with the iPhone was supposed to be impossible because the fixed focus camera made them all blurry (that was before the iphone 3GS). The first working version of pic2shop was released in April’09, and there was a lot of worldwide interest immediately. Since then, we have perfected the barcode scanner, made it work in real-time on the iPhone, and added many retailers and millions of products to our database.

Diana: The pic2shop team has been working with Shopzilla for several months now. How has the experience been?

Benoit: It has been very rewarding. We chose Shopzilla early on because it was the most expedient. But Shopzilla turned out to have to best product coverage for our purposes (UPC lookup), and to give great affiliate revenue. We are very excited that the program is now available in the UK, France and Germany!

Diana: You currently use our FTP Data Feeds; how has the integration process been?

Benoit: The FTP Data Feed has a standard format and was very straightforward to integrate. The only problem is the coverage in terms of EANs, not every merchant has included this information yet. This information is necessary for us in order to match the offers with the barcodes. For the retailers who are reading this, please include EANs in your feeds!  Without them, we cannot show your products in pic2shop.

Diana: The Shopzilla UK Publisher Program will be offering a Catalog API in early 2010. Is that something you are looking forward to?

Benoit: Yes, we look forward to the upcoming Catalog API.  We have had a very good experience with the US web API. Having an API was more convenient than, say, an FTP feed. As volume increases, we just need to cache results. Integration was very straightforward, and we never had to make any change since then. As a developer, that’s the highest praise I can give.

Diana: Mobile applications are becoming ever more present on the market, where does your application figure in terms of category relevance?

Benoit: Besides games, comparison shopping may be the category with the broadest appeal. Who does not like to get a better deal? We are looking for ways to increase the appeal of pic2shop, so that it is the first place iPhone users and retailers turn when they think of comparison shopping. Many people are not even aware that this stuff is possible, but when they learn about it, the reaction is invariably an enthusiastic “Wow! How do I get it?”

Diana: What makes pic2shop so unique/important to the market?

Benoit: Well, definitely the real-time barcode scanner. Just point the camera at a barcode, wait a second, click! You get the online prices and links to explore further. There are only three apps (out of 100,000!) on the App Store right now that can do that, and pic2shop is the most flexible of the three. In many ways, it is like a mobile browser with barcode input. It can show prices of course, but also product specifications, user reviews, demonstration videos, coupons, anything you can dream of. Some manufacturers want to build their own iPhone app, and we license the barcode reader to them, but some are just happy to give us material to include in the results.

Diana: In your own personal opinion, how much success can be achieved with this type of application, and how far can this technology go?

Benoit: I believe that mobile advertising will soon be larger than online advertising. It can reach people wherever they go, not just when they sit at their PC. If it’s not intrusive, it can provide tremendous value by being highly relevant and timely. It is not clear how the technology will evolve. For example, will people want dedicated apps, or just mobile web sites better integrated with their phone’s camera, GPS, and other capabilities? We will probably see a few iterations before the dust settles. In the meantime, we’ll take pic2shop as far as we can.

Thank you for your input Benoit, and we hope to see pic2shop evolve into a leader on the marketplace! For anyone interested in finding out more information or wanting to download the app (it is free to download!), head over to the pic2shop website.

Shopzilla Publisher program and Twitter

Monday, October 19th, 2009

twitterJust as a healthy reminder to all of our Publishers that you can find us on Twitter. We started using Twitter earlier this year, and it has become a valuable tool for us to share hints and tips, performance announcements and  industry news. It’s a great way to stay connected with our Publishers and anyone else interested in hearing what we have to say!

If you already use Twitter, send us a message to let us know who you are. That way, we can add you and send any valuable information we think you would appreciate! Our alias is @shopzillaUK. See you there!

Dynamic banners - get ready!

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

Example of a Shopzilla Publisher US dynamic asset

Shopzilla Publisher Teamhas worked hard to deliver you a top of the range product thus enabling you to become successful Publishers. That’s why we have been investing a lot of our time and resources in developing a new feature: dynamic assets.

What’s so special about them?

1. As the name says, the ads are ‘dynamic’ - the offers you display change just as offers on BizRate do. This way you never risk linking to a product that’s no longer available!

2. Dynamic assets feature will enable you to populate the ads with products you choose - you build dynamic assets based on top keyword or category search results, or build comparison shopping assets for specific products.

3. You can choose the length of your creative - if you are an experienced affiliate marketer, you probably know that sometimes short description works better; in other cases long creative, including more details, will be more attractive to your readers/customers. Our new type of ads give you best of both words, with the choice of ads with long or short descriptions!

4. Customize your assets to complement your website’s design -  you will have the full control over the appearance of your dynamic ads: from the background colour to the link colours before they’re clicked, when they’re clicked and when you’re thinking about clicking them. And more!

Are you excited? We certainly are!!

So now the big question - when can our Publishers expect this new feature to be available? Well, it will be available on 7th July and onwards.

Shopzilla Publisher Program - we’re expanding!

Thursday, May 7th, 2009
german and french flag plugged in computer

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin...and Paris!!

Yes, the struggle for world domination in affiliate marketing world never ends! After conquering the United States and recent launch in UK the time has come to take on continental Europe. And following Shopzilla Europe path, France and Germany will be the first two countries to enjoy the benefits of Shopzilla Publisher Program.

With the preparations to get the show on the road at full speed, we are hoping to get the French and German portals ready in no time. Watch this space for further updates!

a4uExpo in Amsterdam wants you!

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
auu wants you!

a4uexpo wants you!

After the success in London, A4U are off to conquer Europe!

A4U conference and expo will be held on 28-29 April in the beautiful city of Amsterdam and if you are interested in exchanging ideas, exploring opportunities in Europe and UK (for those of you based on the main land), and mingling with some of the biggest names in Affiliate Marketing - a4uExpo Amsterdam is the place to be for both merchants and publishers!

Registration for the expo gives you access to over 40 sessions (!), all exhibitions, pre- and after-event networking parties and many more. Check the full list of perks and pass prices on a4u website

Follow UK Shopzilla Publisher on Twitter and facebook

Monday, March 30th, 2009

Hey everyone,

stay updated about the UK Shopzilla Publisher Program. 600 are following Shopzilla UK already on Twitter. Also, become a fan of Shopzilla Publisher Program Europe on facebook.

Get your twitter mosaic here.

Accessing Publisher Portal - loading time

Monday, March 23rd, 2009
so slow...

so slow...

Hey Publishers!

We wanted to assure you that we are aware of how painfully slow our portal is. Please, bear with us while we are working to improve the loading time.

Thank you for your patience! The UK Publisher Team

UK Shopzilla Publisher- it’s here!

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
Champagne bottle

UK Shopzilla Publisher program beta is here - time to celebrate!

After months of preparations we are pleased to announce that Shopzilla Publisher UK Program is up and running!

The first beta version of the program is available from today. During the following couple of weeks and months, we will be working on adding new features and advertising materials, in order to make the program even more competitive.

We are looking forward to receiving your feedback as we are aiming to improve our service and deliver the best Affiliate Program as a result! Your opinion is highly appreciated.

Go ahead and try it out today!

Your UK Shopzilla Publisher Team

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