Published June 12th, 2008
in Business Mashup.
This is another update to the Shopzilla WordPress Plugin I released back in February. You can use this plugin to monetize a WordPress blog by featuring embedded product comparison results inside each blog post or on a sidebar.
Before you setup the plugin on your blog, you first need to apply to Shopzilla Publisher Program which is a “pay per click” affiliate program meaning each click on the product results below results in an affiliate commission to the publisher (a blogger in this case). This is very similar to how Google Adsense works except Shopzilla program is designed specifically for shopping oriented websites.
What is included with this update?
This particular plugin update makes it possible for you to configure the maximum number of products for each product comparison results table individually. This can be done with another (third) argument that you supply to the “shopzilla_offers” tag inside your blog post. If you leave the argument at 0 then the global value from the plugin options will be used.
For example the line of code below will product the price comparison table you see at the end of this blog post.
<!—shopzilla_offers=633034954,8,3—>
In addition to this change, I added a configuration parameter for the domain to be used to talk to the API server. Shopzilla has changed this domain in the past and this parameter will allow you to change it on the fly for your blog in case Shopzilla does it again in the future.
How do I get it on my blog?
To upgrade - just download this archive and copy its content of on top of your previous installation in the “plugins” folder. For new installations please refer to the Readme file that comes with this plugin.
For more information on how to become a Shopzilla publisher please go to the Shopzilla Publisher Program home page. To find why I wrote this plugin, please read my original blog post about it.
Published June 11th, 2008
in Popular Sites Series.
This is May 2008 revision of the Popular Price Comparison web sites list. You can find the last month revision of the list here.
Just a few remarkable changes. like.com (23.68%) keeps advancing (first place for second month in a row) while calibex.com (-25.13%) lost a quarter of Alexa rank. Comparing to the data for May of last year, like.com moved from #26 to #21 while calibex.com moved from #16 to #18.
A new site has broken the 50K Alexa threshold, salescircular.com (-9.56%). It has a terrible design, tons of Google ads, and broken link to the FAQ page. I consider taking down the entry.
(*) Note: traffic stats for these sites is an aggregate of all traffic to the top domain (e.g. Yahoo.com or Google.com) and thus cannot be used to judge how popular this particular price comparison service is.
Published June 10th, 2008
in Interesting / Other.
As I examine my options about replacing my 10 year old Honda Accord with a more fuel efficient alternative, I stumbled upon an interesting fact. I was playing with Kelley Blue Book estimate of my car value by changing the number of odometer miles and observing the changes. What turned out is that after 200,000 miles the car value stops decreasing. Which implies that if I wanted to sell the car now, it wouldn’t have made a difference if I had driven it more than 20K miles a year.
Is it just a bug in the KBB algorithm that calculates the value, or does the value really stops going down? I think what really happen is that at this age the car condition becomes the prevailing factor and the miles don’t mean that much any more since the modern engines are designed to go well past 200K miles and it is often rust or problems with interior (power windows not working?) that lower the car value, and these usually come with age, not miles.
This brings me to an interesting conclusion. If you own a car and put up around 20,000 miles on it, from the financial point of view there is no reason to try to save miles by renting a replacement for those long trips. You are not really gaining much except for the headache in having to deal with the rental. This of course is not the case if you don’t plan to hold on to the car for very long, or don’t put enough miles to reach the threshold.
Published June 7th, 2008
in Shopping Bargains.
This is a short update on what is going on at Buxr, the project I started with my partner last December. This month we officially launched deal sharing contests and so far they have been a huge success. In just several days since the announcement we had 66 new members who have shared 137 deals and received 12 daily prizes ($10 by Paypal).
There is more than a daily prize at stake. Every time our members share deals and make their votes on deals others submit they contribute towards the monthly prize, or to be correct a choice of three prizes that we put out for vote on the monthly contest page.
I have been learning a lot from these contests and already have some ideas on how they can be improved. The goal is to make them interesting and fun for both: deal submitters and members who come to comment and vote for deals. I discussed some thoughts in this blog post and I will put out more for discussion later as I learn more.
Published June 6th, 2008
in Popular Sites Series.
This is May 2008 revision of the Popular Deal Sites list. You can find the last month revision of the list here.
The change in rating shows the difference compared to April results and includes all deal sites from my database that meet Alexa Rank < 50,000 requirement. I tightened the limit last month after Alexa reworked their algorithms.
Looking at today's results, savings.com (27.46%) has had a dramatic rise. A cursory search doesn't product anything but a bunch of paid reviews. If you have seen any major news break in for them, please let me know in the comments. In the minus column, dealsofamerica.com (-16.09%) had the worst month closely followed by dealslist.com (-15.92%)
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