Extracting the urine!

[Confuscius]

So, we have a whole load of merchants either paying no commission or reduced commission on a variety of products and the trend seems to be increasing. Fair enough BUT as affiliates we are promoting products to SELL FOR A COMMISSION!

There are threads about out of stock items and, my own view is that if you have not got it to sell the it should noy be in your feed. If you are taking advance orders and can track commissions then that seems to be a reasonable halfway house.

I will cite just one merchant example, http://www.shopwindow.com/product.php?p=18831320&c=576 - in the feed and no stock but if they do get stock then you get zilch, nada, nothing. How about this one, http://www.shopwindow.com/product.php?p=18831321&c=576 - a product in the feed but 'Sorry, item "Wii Starter Pack" is not available via Toys R Us Direct' but 'This item may be available via your local store' - amazing!

So the question is, how do we get zero commission items removed from ALL affected merchants? What is DigiWin's policy on this issue? Could we have some official clarification?

Views?

Paul

[Bud]

Also concerned.

[amarath]

Hi Paul,

We are currently working with ToysRUs to remove the wii products (and other products that commissions will not be paid for) from within their feed.

Although there is a reliance on merchants to pass us correct data, we are constantly working towards ensuring that we provide you with products that you will be able to earn commissions from.

ToyRUs is not the norm, and I would like to stress that this demonstrates a small percentage of our merchants that reduce or remove commissions due to limited availability (or other reasons) at this time of year.

Such reasons many include the fact that this can act as a control mechanism on a channel that has been proven to drive serious incremental growth for merchants and specific product lines.

I appreciate your feedback on this one, and am confident that you will not be seeing these products in the feed after today (unless ToyRUs change their commission structure).

Thanks

Amo
Head of ShopWindow

[Confuscius]

Hi Amo

Thanks for the speedy update - I am pleased to hear that you are proactively managing the merchants!

Now if you could just sort out Google for me?

Paul

[Bud]

Personally, the zero commision items aren't a great problem for me although I can understand why they can be seen as such.

My view, zero commission items generally appear to be the good sellers so I really see these as a 'loss leader' that I would rather have in my store to keep people coming back as they know they can get a broad selection and eventually the best deal for themselves, who knows they may even buy something else at the same time. I'm happy to have zero items in my store - within reason.

What really bugs me is 'out of stock' or 'only available in store'. This stops people coming back to my site! Its costs me enough to get them there in the first place and then the first item they check is 'out of stock' therefore wasting all this effort. They won't bother coming back - cheers.

(I'm no expert on coding but I'm sure it would be easy enough to do a stock check call before displaying - or am I wrong?)

[Andy]

No you're not wrong Bud, it is quite a simple task to check if data is how it should be, (or not as it should be) and only display it when it's correct.

Problems can arise though.

For instance, you check for zero price, if it's zero, don't display it:


{if $sPrice > 0.00}
Display the price
{/if}

(untested code, off the top of my head)


This should prevent any zero prices from displaying, but it doesn't stop the counters.
You could normally receive 150 results, thats 15 pages written in the pagination.
Take out all the zero's and you could be left with 99 products, yet you'd still have 15 pages paginated. If this is in a category page, the spiders will index 5 blank pages.

So I changed all zero prices to "Please check price with RETAILERNAME"

For stock checks, I'm not 100% sure that "instock" is in the feed array. I'll have a quick look and try and code something for you if I can. But, you'll get the blank pages again.

The only sure fire way to solve this is have a few more configurations in the merchant Manager. This really needs to be filtered out at the ShopWindow server end. It'd save SW alot of bandwidth too

*cough! Adrian!! Amo!!*

[Bud]

err ....

umm....

*cough! cough! Adrian!! Amo!! Anyone!!*

[amarath]

err ....

umm....

*cough! cough! ADRIAN!!!!!

.... :confused:

oh well, guess Ill have to answer then :D

So, I actually had a meeting with our dev guys about this yesterday, to which the outcome is as follows.

We agree that this should be an option in the ShopWindow admin area, and are currently working through a couple of ways that this could be achieved.

Andy - im going to put your idea over to Kostas and see what he thinks.

We were thinking of being able to identify which products are zero or not in the feeds, and then having the option to include or not include in your shop.
So products are grouped into two, and you guys choose which are or are not included in your shop.

This way, its up to you guys what you have on your site.

This does require some integration at either merchant or our end depending on how we do it, and as we know merchant changes can take a while, so we therefore are looking to integrate a solution that gives us maximum control and limit the requirement on merchant end.

To be honest thats as far as we have got with this, but ive got another meeting on Tuesday about this in which we will try and pin down a solution and identify the way forward.

This has been raised in a few different areas so rest assured we will be addresing this for you.

Ill give you an update after my meeting.

Cheers

Amo