Using Popshops for Affiliate Marketing Product Tables: Service Review

Affiliate Marketing can be done in many different ways, but one of those is the display of products as a catalog or in an article or post. One service available for making affiliate marketing  product tables is called Popshops. I've used their service and currently have a Pro account which is one step up from their free trial version. I had an enterprise account for a while, but I later decided that current limitations weren't worth the difference in price. Here are some notes, basically a review, of Popshops to help you decide if it is right for you.

Popshops is faster than making a table manually in HTML

It is a time intensive process but using Popshops for handpicked product tables is much faster than making tables yourself.  You save time because it has a very nice graphic interface you can browse a merchant in the left sidebar or do a search for a keyword. When you want to add a product to a "shop" aka product table, you have to click a button, so this is only practical for handpicked products, not for adding hundreds or thousands or products. You'll click finger will go numb and your eyes will glaze over after a few hundred.

You get to set up basic table layout.

With Popshops, you can set the number of columns to display, their widths, product image width, spacing, font, number of characters in the description, and font size. They've recently added a "buy now" button.

Autofeed and automatic replacing of unavailable products is lacking

Popshops autoupdating features are still needing to be improved, their autogenerated results for related products normally show very unrelated products (at least in my experience ie baby clothes and women's tops on a table for men's swimsuits and china cabinets on pages for children's furniture) fortunately you don't have to turn on that feature. so if you are deciding between handpicked product tables using copy/paste and Popshops, go with Popshops, you'll be happy.

Wordpress Plugin

They have a wordpress plugin that allows you to add a shop to the end of a post when it is displayed by Wordpress or easily add the HTML of a product to a Post.

Account Upgrades

They offer different subscription plans starting at $5/month (as of writing this article). If you want RSS (limited to the number of products in a shop), you'll need an enterprise account which is much more expensive.  I wanted to go beyond that limitation, so I ended up writing my own RSS script in PHP. I don't blame them for that. Popshops wasn't designed for RSS, they just added it as another way to display a product table.  They're working on premium services for coupon feeds.

Summary

I found that while "shop" or product table creation was fast and easy, especially with their Wordpress Plugin for adding a shop to a post, keeping shop tables updated is a major chore once you have a few hundred shops in your account.   To be fair they do have a page to show you click tracking and shops with unavailable products. I only wish there was a way to set up keywords and negative or exclusion keywords so the autogenerated products and replacement products would actually be related.

Popshops wasn't and isn't designed to show many products or a catalog or even a category of products from a merchant or a group of merchants so if you are looking to do so you'll probably be happier with webmerge if you want HTML or writing your own PHP script if you want dyamic lists of an entire product category or product catalog. Of course, there is nothing stopping you from doing both or all three.

Am I happy with Popshops? Yes, I am. I am just a bit picky and my needs have grown since I started using it.  Since my newer needs weren't being met, I had to learn PHP and start writing my own product display scripts.  Hopefully they'll address some of the areas that need improvement in the coming years and I'll be able to use it more.