Archive for January 2010
Introducing a new, exclusive AvantLink merchant:
Earn commissions on over 40,000 SKUs from top R/C brands such as Traxxas, HPI, Losi, Venom, Pro-Line, Spektrum, E-Flite, ParkZone and much more. Canyon Hobbies is the premiere radio control store on the Internet! What do you get when you join? First and foremost you get a comprehensive Affiliate program dedicated to helping you achieve high conversion rates, and sales (7% baseline payout, worldwide shipping, 45 day cookie).
From their Affiliate program details: At CanyonHobbies.com we have a dedicated support structure designed to attract quality Affiliates such as yourself and reward them for their hard work in promoting our company. This combined with our great product line and outstanding customer service will significantly increase your commissions.
Program highlights include:
- 7% Commission.
- Largest and Best List of Brands in the Hobby Industry.
- Worldwide Shipping.
- 45 Day Cookie.
- Most orders ship within 24 Hours.
- Average order of $150.00.
Let us know what we can do to help you get started promoting Canyon Hobbies. Contact anyone at AvantLink or the program manager Pam Vigil, pam/at/canyonhobbies.com.
Introducing a new, exclusive AvantLink merchant:
Based out of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Skinny Skis specializes in selling top brand gear, apparel and accessories for Nordic skiing. Skinny Skis has been in business for over 35 years and they are one of the nation’s best online sources for high end Nordic gear. Their site is dialed, they have a very responsive program manager and this is an Affiliate program exclusive to our Affiliate network…so you know your traffic is shielded from the cookie theft of unscrupulous Affiliates.
Earn 8% baseline, with 12% potentialm on a 120-day cookie. From their Affiliate program details: Our extensive inventory is available to cross-country and skate skiing enthusiasts nationwide, offering the best selection of Nordic skiing equipment from the industry’s most influential manufacturers – Fischer, Atomic, Rossignol, Madshus, Salomon, and Swix.
Program highlights include:
- Commission Payout: 8%, 12% potential
- Cookie Duration: 120 Days
- Avg. Order Size: $125+
- 30 Day Return/Exchange Policy
- 100% Low Price Guarantee
- Daily Updated Product Datafeed
- PayPal and All Major Credit Cards Accepted
Let us know what we can do to help you get started promoting Skinny Skis. Contact anyone at AvantLink or the program manager Katie Jackson, katie/at/skinnyskis.com.
Just a quick post to let you know that we released some updates to the affiliate email tool for merchants. Here’s an overview of the changes to this tool.
1. The first thing you’ll notice is that the interface has been simplified significantly.
2. We removed the text email option. Instead, all emails will contain a standard text email part that allows those with text only email capabilities to link to the full HTML version of the email.
3. The HTML email form element has been converted to use the YUI Rich Text Editor which allows for rich formatting of text content, much like a standard word processor.
4. Ad campaigns and personalization text variable tags can now be inserted directly into your email without having to copy and paste HTML like the old version of this tool.
5. Emails can now be scheduled for future delivery. As part of this functionality, we’ve also also added the ability for you to insert staged ad campaigns into your emails. This means that you can setup promotional ads and emails before the promotion start date and schedule the email to be delivered when the promotion goes live. No more staying up late or getting up at the crack of dawn to get your promotional emails out 
Scott Kalbach
AvantLink.com
This week we’ve released a few new features in our ProductSearch API module, aimed at improving the control affiliates have over how the search is actually performed.
First, there is now the ability to specify multiple search terms within one API request. For instance, suppose you wanted to search for two kinds of snowboards, say the “Technine Icon Series Snowboard” and the “Rossignol Alias Snowboard”. The best option, the one that gives you the most control over what results to show to your users, was – and still is – to do two separate API requests, one for each type of snowboard. However, you now also have the option of making one search request, using “OR” syntax, e.g. “search_term=Technine Icon Series Snowboard OR Rossignol Alias Snowboard”; the API will automatically perform both searches separately and then combine the results for you. To enable this functionality you must turn on an advanced syntax option for the API by adding the parameter “search_advanced_syntax=1″ to your request.
To see the effects yourself, take a look at the following search results for those two snowboards, with and without the new advanced syntax option turned on:
http://www.avantlink.com/api.php?affiliate_id=101&module=ProductSearch&output=html&website_id=77&search_results_layout=list&search_results_fields=Thumbnail+Image|Product+Name|Merchant+Name&search_term=Technine+Icon+Series+Snowboard+OR+Rossignol+Alias+Snowboard&search_advanced_syntax=0
[Without advanced syntax, search terms are not processed separately, and results tend to be dominated by just one group.]
http://www.avantlink.com/api.php?affiliate_id=101&module=ProductSearch&output=html&website_id=77&search_results_layout=list&search_results_fields=Thumbnail+Image|Product+Name|Merchant+Name&search_term=Technine+Icon+Series+Snowboard+OR+Rossignol+Alias+Snowboard&search_advanced_syntax=1
[With advanced search, each search term is treated separately, and results are more evenly spread.]
The next addition, also requiring the use of the advanced syntax option, is the ability to flag portions of your search term as required in all matches, or as “stop” words (terms that if found, should exclude an item from your results). You can use the “+” and “-” characters to indicate terms that must or must not be present in your search results; you can even enclose groups of words in parentheses and then preface the whole group with a “+” or “-” character to quickly modify a whole series of keywords. As an example, suppose you were looking for a particular jacket from The North Face; you might start off with a very simple search of “The North Face jackets”:
But then you decide that you’re really only interested in the “Khumbu” style of jacket, so you can add “+Khumbu” to your search to require that “Khumbu” be present in each result, e.g
In case you’re wondering what that “%2B” business is, that’s the encoded equivalent of the “+” character; if you’re using PHP the urlencode() function can do this for you easily. Finally, suppose that you’re interested only in Boy’s or Men’s versions of the jacket; you could add “-Girl -Women” or alternatively “-(Girl Women)” to your request to further filter the results:
The third, and last, of the improvements to the ProductSearch API does not involve the advanced syntax option, but rather adds the ability to specify which pieces of information (“input fields”) should be considered in a search. Ordinarily a product search will consider all of the available, searchable information, specifically: product SKUs, names, UPCs, brand name/manufacturer details, and categorization data. If you want to perform a very specific type of search however, you can use the “search_input_fields” parameter to restrict your search to use just one or more of these pieces of information. A common example would be if you were doing product name lookups only, and did not want brand name or categorization data to factor into your results at all. Consider the following example to see the differences in a normal versus a field-restricted search for “GPS Running Watches”:
http://www.avantlink.com/api.php?affiliate_id=101&module=ProductSearch&output=html&website_id=77&search_results_fields=Thumbnail+Image|Product+Name|Merchant+Name&search_results_options=interleave&search_term=GPS+Running+Watches
[Searching all available fields can sometimes yield seemingly unrelated results, often due to categorization data which mentions some of the search keywords.]
http://www.avantlink.com/api.php?affiliate_id=101&module=ProductSearch&output=html&website_id=77&search_results_fields=Thumbnail+Image|Product+Name|Merchant+Name&search_results_options=interleave&search_term=GPS+Running+Watches&search_input_fields=name
[Searching only product names yields a much more tightly restricted set of results.]
If you get a chance to try out these advanced features on any projects of your own, be sure to let us know!
-David & AvantLink
P.S. Don’t forget about the API Request Builder (available from the “Tools” page of your affiliate account) – it can be a big help with learning about and experimenting with our API modules and their parameters.
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