How would you build something like this? (Multiple buttons for multiple affiliates)

[built]

I don't think there any plugins for this, been searching and haven't found any.

Basically, I want to build something with multiple buttons for different affiliate networks. I was thinking of just making simple buttons and saying "Check price on Amazon" "Check price on Newegg", but at the same time I'm not sure if that would be less appealing?

Example:

Also: Would using a logo like this violate Amazons terms of service?

 

[Steve]

Do the vendors you want to show have an api to get the prices?

Even if they dont you could scrape their site for a price but that would he harder.

What platform/language is your site built on?

 

[built]

Do the vendors you want to show have an api to get the prices?

Even if they dont you could scrape their site for a price but that would he harder.

What platform/language is your site built on?

My sites built on Wordpress. Amazon has an API and I think Pepperjam also has an API so I will see if I can find anything on stackoverflow.

 

[jäger]

I don't think I fully understand what you're asking.

Are you talking about fetching the prices? I've done this before, and like Steve said, where there's an API - use that - where there's not, I crawled the HTML page. It's a bitch when they change up the template, tho.

This is basically just a price comparison page. What are you asking in terms of multiple buttons? Yes you need a button for each store.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Also: Would using a logo like this violate Amazons terms of service?

Yes, unless it's a button/image they specifically provide for this use. You can't use any custom Amazon logos that you create yourself. Even if it's their actual logo you pulled from their storefront.

Do the vendors you want to show have an api to get the prices?

You'll likely be out of the terms of service if you don't use the API to keep prices updated, like Amazon. Like Steve also points out, if you go the scraping route, every time they update their site you'll have to redo the XPath work or however you're doing it. It's not ideal at all.

What I would do for the multiple buttons and links, if I had to go this route, is use custom fields. You can use the built in ones in Wordpress or you can use something like Advanced Custom Fields. This way you can have prebuilt tables you copy and paste with buttons built in mapped to a specific store's custom field, and then you just drop the affiliate link in there.

For the prices, I'd probably go with ranges like $, $$, $$$, $$$$, where it's literally the dollar signs and not values. Unless they all have an API, I'd use those ranges. If it boiled down to only 1 or 2 not having the API and I still had a good 6 or 7 stores, I'd probably leave the non-API sites out, unless they were must haves.

 

[Rageix]

I've done something similar for a client back in the day.

1. Scrape all the sites on a regular basis and build an up to date table with all the needed data on it. If possible use a pricing API if the vendor provides one, but lots of them don't.
2. Build an outward facing REST API.
3. When the end user hits the page their browser makes a request to your server to get the data in like JSON format or whatever you want to use.
4. Using some kind of Javascript framework, like React or similar, render the data as an widget.

A little complex but nothing really out of the ordinary. For a small amount of products shouldn't be too difficult. If you want to scale this it does however pose many challenges scraping entire sites and putting all your data togeather in a way that makes sense.