A Programmer’s Alternative To BANS
For those in the affiliate marketing game, there is apparently a decent amount of money to be made using the affiliate program provided by eBay. The U.S. eBay affiliate program (which you can sign up for at Commission Junction if you’re interested) pays when visitors you drive to the popular auction site meet one of these conditions:
| Action | Pay |
|---|---|
| A visitor becomes a confirmed, active user of eBay.com within 30 days of registration. | $25.00 |
| A registered user places a Winning Bid. | 50% of the auction fees |
So that’s a really basic and simple overview of the eBay affiliate program. This post is really about what you can do to convert with that program though. For most people, the easiest way to drive traffic to eBay through your affiliate account is to setup an “instant store” using the Build A Niche Store software. It’s better known as BANS.
BANS has become incredibly popular because it is simple to use and has proven successful for a lot of people in the eBay affiliate program. When you install BANS you choose what eBay categories you’re interested in making a store for and the software does the rest. You can see a list of stores people have created on the BANS site to get an idea of what the program is capable of. BANS costs $97 and comes with a lot of perks for that price. It’s especially well-suited for those who don’t quite have the technical knowledge to manipulate eBay’s RSS feeds on their own.
If you’re one of those people who might want a little more control over their own eBay store there’s an alternative in phpBay Pro. phpBay Pro is an API for PHP that wraps around the eBay RSS feeds and parses the results for you. It also encrypts links and images from eBay which is useful if you’re concerned about security in regards to your store and search engines.
With phpBay Pro you can make a store built around keywords as opposed to the pre-defined categories available on eBay. phpBay Pro is also cheaper than BANS with a $39 price tag for the API alone. For an additional $20, you can also buy a WordPress plugin that lets you embed eBay auctions directly into posts on your blog.
I purchased phpBay Pro for myself over the holiday weekend to use on an idle domain name I own (it’s Nintendo Wii related, so it’s probably a good candidate for this). To give you an idea of how easy phpBay Pro is to use here’s an example of what the code looks like to pull down Wii related auctions:
<?php
require_once("ebay.php");
$keywords = "nintendo wii";
// create an instance of the ebay class
$ebay = new ebay();
// set the number of listings to display per page
$ebay->eb_frpp = "10";
// create the listings content
$ebay->listings($keywords, $category);
// display the listings
echo $ebay->html;
?>
If anyone has any experience with either BANS or phpBay Pro I’d love to hear about it in the comments of this post.
I purchased BANS about 2 weeks ago, and have already grossed $69.00 from it, with very little effort and its not even indexed in Google yet…
Im a programmer myself, but I didn’t hear about phpBay until after I purchased BANS, which im kind of kicking myself for. But I dont think its going to be a problem, BANS should pay for itself pretty quickly at this rate.
if you are even more hardcore, you can use Rss2Html to create an ebay niche store from their RSS feeds, which is free (but not nearly as simple)
Comment by $1000 Affiliate Experiment — December 26, 2007 @ 4:06 pm
Another thing i forgot to mention is that BANS V3.0 is due out late January, and there are a crap load of new features being included
Comment by $1000 Affiliate Experiment — December 26, 2007 @ 4:07 pm
I just saw the post on Affiliate Confession (great site, by the way) about the new 3.0 version of BANS. It sounds pretty nice.
It really wouldn’t take much to parse the feeds yourself, like you suggest, but I decided I’d give something “out of the box” a try and it works pretty well. I like the extra level of control that phpBay provides over BANS.
Comment by Link — December 26, 2007 @ 6:26 pm
A highly recommended site is elfingo.com for online auctions. They are the new ebay. Many smaller sites like this offer buyers far better deals than ebay ever could. Buyser also save a ton because this site charges little or nothing depending on the day. One more reaso I like elfingo.com is because they don’t take a part of the sale at all. No commissions or final value fees. A+++ http://www.elfingo.com
Comment by sandeep — February 20, 2008 @ 7:23 pm
That’s a pretty shameful paid comment/plug there, buddy. I’m in a good mood so I’ll allow it this time.
Comment by Link — February 20, 2008 @ 7:30 pm
y0,
I looked around for a free alternative to BANS but couldn’t really find anything. I also checked out phpbay pro and almost bought it but decided to hold out. So after a little more research, I came up with my free alternative. It’s called (you ready *drumroll*) The Poor Mans BANS. Ok, so it’s not very creative, but the idea behind it has earned me $301 for the month of February. I’ve rolled out a few more sites and anticipate even more in March. Anyway, check it out, I’d love for you to share your thoughts.
http://www.nullamatix.com/make-money-with-a-poor-mans-bans-build-a-niche-store/
And seriously, there’s nothing for sale. This is something anyone can implement for as little as $2/mo (hosting costs?), or maybe even with a free host to make it absolutely free. Just requires a little time and a little effort. Btw, nice design. You do this for a living? :P (yea, that’s a lame attempt at a joke).
Guy Patterson’s last blog post..5 ?Make Money Online? Blogs Worth Subscribing To
Comment by Guy Patterson — February 28, 2008 @ 10:22 pm
I can give you an example of each script, active on two of my sites.
Here is one example of a site built with phpBay Pro… http://www.inkjetinkbythepint.com . This was a domain that I’ve owned for a while and thought that I would try out the script.
The difficulty for me has been setting up the site to LOOK like an ecommerce site. Not really happening for me, however it is great that Wordpress has so many themes available free to customize the look of the site. That is in contrast to BANS, which is limited for the average user as far as customization is concerned. There is a site, http://www.colormybans.com that provides a free tool to “color your bans site”. It works well, however, once again is limited to only changing the basic colors. From a nonprogrammers point of view, BANS is more limited.
An example of a BANS site is http://www.ink-republic.com .
This site, is a basic out of the box bans site using the basic template with a simple background color change. Personally, after tinkering with both scripts and from the point of view of being as the average person that doesn’t have much web experience, phpBay pro is more versatile visually, yet more difficult to set up to appear as a store. BANS on the other hand, provides a straight out of the box categorized store, yet lacks easy customization. That’s my two cents!
Comment by Mike Nelson — April 9, 2008 @ 7:11 pm
Also too, I’ve purchased a script called bayRSS. This to me, is a limited version of phpBay Pro. It does work with Wordpress, yet is more like the initial version of phpBay Pro and is limited as to the number of keywords and being able to limit the search results to a specific category.
For example, in bayRSS, you can only specify keyword and cannot specify that keyword to only pull results from a specific category. So for me…that just doesn’t do it.
But, if you’re only looking for a simple way to add basic ebay auctions without any other functionality, it’s ok.
One more note: phpBay Pro is about to release a new plugin that works with oscommerce. This to me is the most exciting of all plugin scripts for the ebay affiliate program that I’ve ever heard of and I’m really surprised that there isn’t more news about it on the net.
Check one of these stores out…they ARE NOT MINE…they are the owners of phpBay Pro. These look absolutely awesome, yet load very slowly because he’s used so many graphics.
Here they are…
http://www.corvettegarage.com
http://www.jeepgarage.com
http://www.hummergarage.com
Like I said - these are not my sites and I’m not spamming links. I think if you take a look at these though, you’ll see that this new plugin that’s going to be updated soon is really great. I plan to buy as soon as it’s available for the new ebay in house affiliate program.
Take care,
Mike
Comment by Mike Nelson — April 9, 2008 @ 7:18 pm
I seriously considered buying BANS, but decided on the phpBay Pro API for more control over they layout and structure of the site. I just finished my first niche site using phpBay. Here it is: http://www.roadbikescheap.com
From everything I’ve heard and read, it’s not enough to just create a site with listings and watch the money roll in. In order to drive consistent traffic and keep the spiders coming, it’s important to keep adding fresh, relevant content.
So far I’m getting decent organic traffic from Google, but Yahoo and Live haven’t indexed yet. I’m also trying ads with USFreeAds. Google picks up the ads quickly, but it seems like they drop off the radar just as quick.
Good Luck.
Ben
Ben’s last blog post..Stock Photography for the Everyman
Comment by Ben — April 10, 2008 @ 12:04 pm
I really like the way you’ve got that site set up. I’m trying something new though and using BANS to do it. I’m setting up sites that don’t list prices or photos. Just links. Take a look at this one. http://www.inkmyprinter.com and http://www.easypartfinder.com. I’m going to try this strategy out for a while and see what happens.
How difficult is the API version to use? I’m interested in using it if I can use it with Joomla. Wade didn’t have any information for Joomla but the API is supposed to work with any php based site.
Any info appreciated on that.
Comment by Mike Nelson — April 18, 2008 @ 3:28 am
On the subject of phpbay and bans, does anyone know of a Wordpress theme that has an ecommerce look to it? I’ve looked and looked all over the net. I’m sure that if I had the know how, I could modify a css style sheet, but I’m not that web savvy yet.
Also looking for a good ecommerce plugin for wordpress. I’ve got a normal ecommerce site that I’m wanting to change from Prostores to Wordpress with an intergrated shopping cart.
Bans and phpBay are great - it’s a matter of finding a good template or designing one to set the look apart from others.
Thanks,
Mike
P.S. - cool site.
Comment by Mike Nelson — April 21, 2008 @ 6:46 pm
I have a couple of “Poor Man’s BANS” sites and I must say that it works pretty slick. there are a couple of bugs I would like to work out to fully automate the system, but overall I am happy with results that I didn’t have to put any money towards to get.
If I am not mistaken, the BANS and phpPro update automatically as long as there are auctions, right? With the poor mans BANS it just keeps adding posts if there are auctions. I think that might be one difference that I can see (I haven’t tried BANS yet at this point).
Good work on all the above sites, too.
Comment by Board Games — April 29, 2008 @ 12:10 pm
do you know how the redirect or clocking works with phpbay
can not seem to get it to work i want my sites to not have the rover.ebay.com/whatever/what
i want mysite.com/whatever
brent’s last blog post..My blog my way
Comment by brent — May 3, 2008 @ 12:32 am
Hi There,
I’m new to Bans and put up my first site a little over a week ago. It’s still pretty much plain Jane, but I’m tweaking it daily and hopefully it’ll look better in a weeks time.
If you’re new to creating your own store and have no idea of what php, rss, seo etc…, you’ll learn a lot. I learn a little something every day to make my store more visible to the search engines and hopefully it’ll start paying off down the road.
Here’s my first site..http://www.bestmetaldetectordeals.com
Check back in a week to see the changes I made.
Mike
Comment by Mike — May 9, 2008 @ 6:10 pm
Hi Again,
I’m back and have been tweaking my descriptions, adding some content, and trying to keep Google happy at the same time, but that’s driving me nuts.
I make these subtle changes to help my rankings, and every time I dom it seems like I get penalized. Maybe I haven’t given it long enough, but I’ve looked at sites that seem to be straight out of the box and they’re higher in the search engines.
Again, I’m concentrating on content now, but hopefully by this time next week I’ll start dressing it up a little because it looks plain Jane to me too.
Bye for now!
Mike
http://www.bestmetaldetectordeals.com
Comment by Mike — May 15, 2008 @ 6:08 pm