Shopping site: Any tips?

Status
Not open for further replies.
P

patrick24601

The Action Man
Jan 29, 2007
640
6
0
I've been working on a shopping site now for awhile. So far it just does the basics. Lets you shop by high level category, down to sub, then shows you a grid of products, and the clickthrough takes you to affiliate link. The outbound link is never shown. It bounces you through my own PHP on the way to the vendor site so I can log the click, etc.

I'd like to add a forum pretty soon. I'll use the forum membership system as a basis for the site membership. My next goal is also to add some kind of search.

Is anybody else doing something like this? What are your biggest challenges?
 


well you best make sure whatever site your sending them to to checkout matches your site exactly. If they sense that they are no longer on the same site they arent going to buy.
 
Before you get into forums and stuff you may consider adding stuff to the product pages like reviews scraped from amazon to start but lets users add reviews as well. If you work on the product pages more you'll rank for those products more specifically. And if you can get user content added it's just like having a forum but more on topic. Maybe run a review contest if you have a good number of visitors. Something like every time you write a reivew on a product between now and X you'll be entered to win ...... some prize or money" then stick a seach box next to it so people can write reviews for products they own.
 
THanks.

Narsticle: What do you mean? If they are on my shopping site and I shoot them to Overstock/Circuit City it is obvious they are going to be on a different site.
 
smaxor: I need to add some kind of membership system to get the reviews going. And my membership is going to be based on VB. So logically to me VB has to come before any inhouse reviews.

I also need to figure out how to use PHP to pull Amazon reviews. Anybody?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom