Making a site like affiliate site

  • Hi,

    I’m currently starting an affiliate site thru WordPress. I’m not looking to make it a typical blog styled site (only writing reviews on products and expecting people to purchase thru that link etc (although there will be a blog at some point)).

    I’m probably 75% familiar with WordPress + Woocommerce and can work with it but how would I go about creating each product by scraping it from the affiliate/retailer’s site? My niche includes thousands of different products from different brands and retailers like lyst.com. I’d like users to be able sort, categorize and search products. I would also need the products to automatically update for new sales according to each retailer.

    Is this possible or do you think lyst.com did it manually with a custom in-house algorithm? Could be possible as they have $60m from the Louis Vuitton Group.
    TIA

    • This topic was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Moved to Fixing WordPress, this is not an Everything else WordPress topic
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  • Scraping sites is a lot of work. Unless you have a farm of dedicated servers set up to scrape the sites content, you’ll never get things updated in even close to a reasonable time. As a note I’ve got a site that imports CSV files from suppliers, and while that is fast (can take 5-6 hours to import around 10,000 products), that’s all on the server without the DOM parsing that you’d have to do by scraping.

    Any site that does that correctly will use either import/epxort files (eg: the CSV files that I’ve used) or they’ll have an API or direct connection to the suppliers sites to get the data automatically. This is all big time and big $ work. You can start off smaller, but like you said, the big boys don’t do it the way that you’re proposing, for very good reasons.

    You can create marketplace website in WP where users upload their information and products. Instead of affiliate, you will have affiliates without spending on products.
    Yes, it is a lot of setups but the reasons to do it are many and the steps in your business plan are very important. I will suggest you the following
    – Create and setup carefully the marketplace and thing about all options which one to restrict and others to allow. Test it, check what % you will give them.
    -Make it available and create some content to avoid empty content
    -Advertise slowly the platform, check who is advertising the same and who is enabling Adsence. This will tell you how to advertise and improve CTR.
    -When your brand is already known a little bit the people will start to come for the brand. For example in the past when I needed something I didn’ type “product”.. in SERP, I just type eBay first and search inside.
    -Why is important the brad. Usually, you can’t rely on SEO in this type of sites/there are many reasons, but the most important is the user-generated content -ugc, duplicated content and CSV, decreasing the site performance and lot of work to avoid all this.
    -When you start making money than you can chose the way you want to support (increase brand importance, ads or SEO)

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by Yanko.

    Hi miberk90,

    You can use the WooCommerce Product Table to sort, categorize and search products.

    I am also looking for a way to automatically update products from web scraping, except I only have a few products compared thousands as you suggested. Have you had any luck? I can web scrape using Python and update the products by uploading a CSV to WooCommerce, but I cannot work out how to combine this and do it automatically in the cloud.

    More detail in my post: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/web-scraping-to-automatically-update-woocommerce-product-data/#new-topic-0

    Charlie

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