Affiliate product feeds in Wordpress

bernard

bernard

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Woocommerce or Custom Posts?

What are the benefits of each?

Woocommerce is set up to deal with products, but you don't actually need all the cart/payment stuff.

Custom Posts is not set up, but you can get fairly easy filter/search functionality using something like Facetwp and various Gallery/Grid plugins.
 
One potential positive I see for Woocommerce right now is - Gutenberg. WC will be supported and it will work.

Anything custom will no doubt be able to be made to work, but may require a heap more custom work when they force Gutenberg upon us.
 
You will have much more freedom and control over a site with custom posts. Also a lot less bloat. If you use ACF you can create features that otherwise would need plugins.

Benefit of woocommerce is that if you are doing amazon affiliate you can get Woozone to dynamically pull in products and create pages. I ended up still combining ACF into it to get the full functionality I wanted.

My site speed with woocommerce is quite a bit slower than the custom post page. Both running on the same server and caching setup.
v3U5HrO.jpg

Both example pages are image heavy and similar in size. Note the amount of requests required. (to be honest, both are too high)
 
I'm going with Custom Posts, simply don't need so many of WC features.
 
Product feeds don’t convert as well as custom posts as they look and feel a bit like an ecommerce store.
 
I've looked into this a bit now.

WP All Import seems to be the most popular plugin for various reason.

I find it expensive, but will get it later. I also strongly dislike "free but not functional" plugins. Currently using this simple, yet stable plugin Really Simple CSV Importer (https://wordpress.org/plugins/really-simple-csv-importer/). I clean up the XML feeds with Python and also print the CSV from that. For a more automated system, you could do the same with PHP/Cron serverside and import automatically using WP All Import. That's probably what I will end up with. Maybe you can do that with some XML-RPC trickery as well.

I use CPT UI and ACF for custom post creation and maintenance. FacetWP to present it. The latter is now $99 then $50/year recurring. It was $24 when I first got it. It's a very nice plugin. It's a plugin for those who don't need it. Custom Query, some css grid and a little jquery show/hide, move around. Not revolutionary, but it now has a template builder based on Elementor (looks like it). Add a little bit of css and you're running quickly with a nice responsive filterable grid. Non coders will find it intimidating, due to documentation being adequate but definitely spartan. No nice hand holding with long videos here. Got to pay attention. It's all there though, but you can fuck up in a number of ways and need to understand a little about what goes into a WP site, to debug it. In the end, I got it up and running, look nice and simple, behaving as I want, with only a bit of frustation and only a few lines of custom css. Highly recommended.
 
An addendum, I just bought WP All Import, which needs an Add On to work with ACF, clocking in at $139 total. Not exactly cheap, but it is something which will work and it does allow for a fully automated feed import process.
 
WP ACF and All Import are great. Like I mentioned in my other post, I use them, and prepare the data with Python and just feed into WP.
 
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