I see that EBay has an affiliate API for sending customers to EBay:
http://developer.ebay.com/devzone/guides/ebayfeatures/Basics/eBay-AffiliateTrackingConcepts.html
However, is it possible to track conversions and see if a specific customer purchased a specific product? I can't find any data on getting affiliate reports or what the reports contain.
If you go to the eBay Partner Network and click on Reports > Download Reports you can generate reasonably detailed traffic and revenue reports, down to the ItemID.
With regards to determining which specific eBay username has lead to the conversion, I really don't think this is something that eBay would make publicly available to you.
As much as we would all like to know who it was it was that entered into a frantic bidding war at 23:06:11 to win that almost new Jenna Jameson Moulded Pussy and Anus, in many circles this is considered personal information.
The above notwithstanding, however, you could apply your own tracking methods through the use of advertising campaigns, which are trackable within the revenue reports. Batch campaigns can be made by clicking Campaigns > Create Campaigns in Bulk. From there, it would be a matter of disseminating links to each campaign and logging to whom each was advertised.
More information can be got from the User Manual
Related
I have a very basic requirement for a CRM I'm building in the Consumer Debt space. An issuer, say Bank of America, has to charge off a credit card, so then send the credit card with the information to the collections department which can either farm it out to a collection agency, or sell the charged-off debt to another debt buying company. While they're trying to collect the debt, they'll log bits of information about the customer: last address, are they working, did a collection company get involved. That is, they'll collect information about the consumer behind the credit card.
Usually, the debt is passed on to a debt buyer who goes through this whole process again, usually with almost no information from BofA about the previous attempt to collect.
So here's the question: is there any capability in Microsoft CRM (or Salesforce) that would allow this customer record to be sold/transferred/shared between tenants? The idea is that the consumer would be much better represented if their information flowed with the credit card as it made it's way through the debt buyers and collection agencies.
Salesforce has a feature called Salesforce-to-Salesforce that does allow the sharing of data between two previously linked orgs.
You could also build your Managed Package that included web services/callouts to do this.
Dynamics 365 (formerly CRM) can import and export data effortlessly to/from Excel files.
I don't have a clue about Salesforce, but it's reasonable to believe it can too.
To make the data interchange seamless between parties, there would have to be an industry standard way to describe a consumer credit collection profile.
For example, the finance industry has the FIX and FIXML protocols to describe trading transactions, and the publishing industry has the ONIX format for book metadata.
There appears to be something called the Metro 2 format in the credit industry, but I'm not sure if it includes collections information.
If a standard format existed, ISV's could write add-ons for Dynamics 365 and SalesForce to import and export standardized profiles.
I am looking for a method of dynamically linking product information based on the name of the product.
For example: User types in "Playstation 3", the site would then go out and grab any information it can, such as picture, retail price, etc. Ideally, it would let you choose the correct item (returns both ps3 controller and ps3 console, user can choose which). It would then use this information in a product listing.
The easiest way I can think to implement this is to use the existing API of a major retailer such as Amazon. I have a couple completely different ideas for sites, one of which would involve selling from amazon (which I would assume they would be ok with) and another which would only be data mining the information. I am concerned they would not take it very kindly if I was just stealing their images and descriptions.
Is there another way, maybe less "sneaky" way to accomplish this that wouldn't be in legally frowned upon ?
Many web-commerce companies use a data stream known as an API - EBay, Etsy, and Amazon all have API feeds for their products. If you can convince the company to allow you access to their API (usually they will give you a key/password), then you can directly access their back-end database, typically at the read-only level. Depending on the company, you can just write them directly for access.
You are correct when you say that most companies wouldn't take kindly to someone web-scraping their product directory and re-using it. That is unethical, and could lead to big trouble with larger companies with a significant legal presence.
On the other hand, there is nothing to prevent you from cobbling together several API feeds into a Mash-Up - try Yahoo Pipes! to learn the basics of API/Mash-Up integration:
Yahoo Pipes:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/
Here is the link to Amazon's Product Advertising API program:
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/detail/main.html
Good luck, and happy development!
Many online retailers provide a product feed - either well-publicized (William M-B has listed some examples), or sorta-kinda hidden, for the purposes of affiliate marketing. They usually have terms of use around those product feeds, describing in detail what you're allowed to do with them, and exactly how many of your limbs are at risk if you don't play by their rules.
However, the mechanism you're describing sounds remarkably similar to a search engine; there's a well-established precedent for search engines indexing sites, and using their content to reason about the underlying site. Get a lawyer to validate this, but there's a good chance that your intended purpose falls under "fair use".
I'm representative of http://aerse.com.
We are building service, that do the following:
search product by name. For example: galaxy s3, galaxy s 3 or galaxy sIII
return technical specifications (CPU, RAM etc) and product images (thumbnails and high-res images)
provide API http://aerse.com/p
deal with legal issues, provide licenses & etc.
I am writing a java desktop application which will connect to a server and pull various data products. Customers will be charged a 'per-click' fee (i.e. Sally at Acme pulls a data report costing $5 anywhere from 1 to several thousand times per day -- I want her name, customer ID, product price, date/time, etc. sent to quickbooks or peachtree each time she does this). So we could potentially have anywhere from 10 to eventually several hundred instances of this application out there.
Anyone have any suggestions as to how I might approach this? I want to use ONLY java so ideally there would be an api out there for quickbooks or peachtree that would allow for this integration.
Thanks!!!
Marc
I think more detail is needed. The first problem is what application is Sally pulling a report from, if it is in Quickbooks online, how will you get that information from the website to your application. Why do you want to write that information to Quickbooks. Writing to an independent database may be easier. It sounds like there may be some security concerns with what you are trying to do, that may be difficult to overcome in the browser.
I have a site that features other websites, and displayed details. Now I want to get more information about the sites I feature like page views, visits, etc.
How do I do that? Is there an API for it?
First of all, information about how many visits, pageviews, etc. other websites have is generally not publicly available, because (obviously) many companies / website owners don't want to share that information and there's no general-purpose way of getting it.
That said, here's list of websites which attempt to display that kind of information:
Quantcast
Alexa
Compete.com
Google Ad Planner
I'm sure there are others, but these are the ones I'm familiar with. Some of them have APIs, but you should keep in mind that none of them provide accurate data, but only estimates, simply because exact numbers are unknown unless published by the website owner.
Have a look at Google Analytics. It can give you information about visits, pageviews, trends, used webbrowers, screen resolutions and many more!
In our SaaSy webapp we need to collect Google Analytics-like data (like, what pages were visited, how many 404s where there, etc.). I wonder if there are any best practices on what pieces of information should be collected (like, IP, User Agent, etc.) and how should these logs be stored. Requirements on what statistics we're going to display are not yet fixed, but I want to have a starting point.
Tracking for the sake of tracking is pointless. The point of tracking activity on your site is to answer specific business questions, such as how many people are buying your product, or how far are they getting in your sale funnel or other events like signing up for a newsletter, etc...What you should be doing is asking the people who make business decisions what it is they need/want to know, and go from there.
Having said that, most ad-hoc reports can be generated with basics like the URL and timestamp. Ability to parse specific variables from the URL and categorize them and their values is handy for campaign tracking. Tracking IP addresses are good for debugging and finding out what country/region/market the user is coming from. Referring URL is good for tracking where the user came from on the internet (another site, paid vs. organic search, a campaign, etc...).
And then throw a couple of variables into the mix. Allow for the ability to populate variables with arbitrary information (like product IDs, etc...) that can be sent to you and stored, so you can see things like how many times a product was viewed or purchased, how much it cost, etc...
But anyways, to answer your question, ultimately "best practice" is first sitting down with the guys in suits and ask what they want/need to know and work with them to find out if what they want to know is just silly or if it's actually actionable (for example, knowing things like number of pageviews is okay but how actionable is it really? What's MORE actionable is knowing how many of xyz is being sold, or where on your site people are abandoning you, so you can streamline your site, maybe decide your product or offer sucks and needs to be revisited, etc...).
I have to ask though...is there a particular reason you wish to create your own tracking tool as opposed to using or investing in one of the many tools already out there? There is Google Analytics (GA), Yahoo Web Analytics (YWA), Omniture SiteCatalyst, Webtrends to name a few. Some are free, some cost money, but it is an investment that yields real returns if used properly.