Antigua Web Solutions Blog

I haven’t added a ‘WordPress Plugin of the Week’ for some time but here’s one I can recommend. As you know I’ve been working with BANS and WordBay for my eBay affiliate stores but in the interests of diversifying I’ve been looking into the best way to market other merchants products. I wanted a way to market products from a range of affiliate sites e.g. Commission Junction, LinkShare, Pepperjam etc and I also like working with WordPress so I needed an answer to combine both. I especially like working with WordPress rather than a stand alone website and I didn’t want a site that was hosted by the provider of the script as some are. I like to be in much more control than that! In addition some of the methods are expensive!

The WordPress plugin PopShops met my needs and is very easy to use.

Signing up With PopShops

In order to use the plugin you need to sign up with PopShops. They have 3 levels

• Free Basic for up to 10 ’shops’
• Pro- $5 a month for unlimited ’shops’. This version also includes Autofeed
• Enterprise- $30 a month. Includes a search function

If you sign up for the Free Basic first you get a 10-20% discount when you upgrade to a 6-month or 12-month plan.

Installing the Plugin

Install the WordPress plugin in the usual way, go to the PopShops tab in Setting (Options for older versions) and insert your PopShops i.d. to get an APIkey. Now you’re ready to make a new shop.

Making Your First ‘Shop’

Sign into your popShop account. Before you make your first ’shop’ enter all your affiliate details in the account tab. PopShop supports Commision Junction, Linkshare, Pepperjam, LinkConnector,Performics, ShareASale, Betty Mills and bridaluxe. it can be tricky to find the correct i.d. for some of these so check out their help file to ensure you get it right (or you won’t get paid!)

Although PopShops calls the pages you make ’shops’ they are really pages, and you need multiple pages for each actual shop. So 10 free demo pages aren’t going to go very far! Click on your dashboard, create a ’shop’ and pick some products. In order to set up AutoFeed for the Pro or Enterprise versions, click on preferences and activate it.

Inserting Your Shop Into WordPress

Back in your WordPress admin make a new page then go to the PopShops tab in Setting (Options for older versions) and insert your shop into the page. You can also insert a shop into the sidebar or footer or use the PopShops button in the WYSIWYG editor in a page or post to insert a product directly into a post or page.

More about AutoFeed

With the pro or Enterprise versions you get the ability to activate Autofeed. This will populate multiple pages using the keywords and the merchants you used to set up your original page. This is great as you only need to set up one page and then have all the matching products from the merchants you chose appearing in your ’shop’

What I Don’t Like

There is no ability when setting up ’shops’ to group them. For any one site you’ll have lots of pages (20 for the first site I set up) so with multiple sites this is going to be unwieldy. To help I named my sites with a 2 letter prefix (e.g. dcdigital camera, dc SLR cameras etc) so that at least the ’shops’ for the same site will be grouped together. I’d also really like a search ability on my site but paying $30 a month for that is, of course, out of the question (unless I start to make lots and lots of $$’s with this ). I’ll stick to the Pro version for now!

I’ve set up a demo at PopShop Demo Page. There are more options for styling the output (text only, no of columns etc so you can tweak the page to suit your theme.