By popular request – we’ve just added the ability to disable display of Auction Thumbs globally on Posts and Pages with the click of one checkbox.  This is for bloggers who only want to use the sidebar widget functionality of Auction Thumbs.

Now available in version 2.15!

Are you an eBay Partner Network member who likes easy? Easy setup and no maintenance?  That’s what Auction Thumbs was designed to be from the beginning – eBay Partner network autopilot.

We didn’t want blogging to be a two step process each time – writing the post and then worrying about putting your eBay Partner Network links in by adding code or tags into HTML.

It was designed so that if you wanted to be lazy, your affiliate links would just default in via global settings that you setup once during installation.  Product links would appear on your post with no additional effort on your part beyond writing the blog post content.
The default category and search string to the left are what drives the global display of affiliate links.  All your posts, current and archive are immediately populated by these two fields.

Worried that all your content has the same products shown?  Most site visitors probably come in to see 1-3 pages of your content, so who cares?  They’re either a blog subscriber reading the latest post or a visitor from a search engine looking for something in particular.

If it still bothers you, then don’t worry because we have two solutions for that:

1) You can override the default category and search string at the page and post level by entering it in the Auction Thumbs configuration fields next to the post edit window.  No code, no HTML.  You can see this function as part of this video.  By example, this particular post has been overridden so as to display Easy Buttons on eBay.

2) You can set Auction Thumbs to ignore the default keyword and use the post’s tags instead.  Just check the box in the configuration settings and specify a quantity of tags for Auction Thumbs to use.  Voila!  Each post in your archive has unique eBay Partner Network items shown based on the tags.

So,  just focus on blogging, and Auction Thumbs will take care of the rest.

Below is an 8-minute detailed review of all the administrative and configuration settings for Auction Thumbs.

The eBay API call limit policy for developers will be changing on March 1st, 2011.  Historically, eBay has limited the number of calls from software applications to retrieve product information by IP address.  The App ID will now be the basis of checking call limits.

As of today, Auction Thumbs is the only eBay plugin for WordPress blogs that permits it’s users to specify their own App ID.  That means that your eBay API call limit pool of 5,000 calls is yours and yours alone.

With all the other plugins employing an embedded, shared App ID (at the time of this writing), come March 1st there could be a lot of plugins ceasing to function daily if their user base collectively exceeds the eBay API call limit.

Read the official announcement at eBay and read more about our approach to the App ID.

We’ve finally added an oft-requested feature: SEO-Friendly eBay affiliate links.

We feel that this addition completes a feature set that is sure to satisfy the most serious eBay affiliates out there.

From a technical standpoint, the links are done as permanent ’301′ redirects, which is eBay’s preferred method for developers to use.

Upon mouseover of the link, the format will look like this:

http://yourblogdomain.com/customslug/w/com/Miss-Sixty-Ladies-Watch-SJ8001-Tommy-60-Logo-/140494957246?pt=Wristwatches

• ‘yourblogdomain.com‘ will automatically come from your site URL
• ‘customslug’ is an admin-definable slug located in the global settings tab
• The item title and category will be a part of the link as well

We did not choose  to take an easier method and just take the rover link and do a base64_encode as some other plugins do.  That makes for a really long and ugly URL that is not really ‘friendly’.

We hope you like it.

In order to display eBay product listings in your blog, other eBay plugins require you to manually insert the code into each of your blog post pages.  Coding?  Why?

What if you have 500 posts?  You’ll be digging in the posts’ HTML for days plugging in something that looks like this:

[otherEbayPlugins] “snuggie”, 24, 11450, “cheap” [/otherEbayPlugins]

Or you’ll be manually editing your theme files.  Do you really want to mess with that?

See that number 11450 in the code above? That is an eBay category code for “Clothing, Shoes & Accessories”. Do you really want to look up your category filter in a list somewhere or would you rather have a wizard walk you through the eBay category hierarchy specific to your eBay country setting?

Watch this 1:40 video to see why Auction Thumbs is the easier and better choice.

Do you know the potential risks you’re taking with most eBay plugins out there?  Many of them are breaking eBay’s rules and partnership agreement.  What does this mean to you?  It could mean that your listings disappear, or worse – you get banned from eBay’s affiliate program.

Auction Thumbs is different.  We are the WordPress blogging professional’s choice for an eBay WordPress plugin.  We’ve  put a lot of consideration into making the Auction Thumbs design…

• High Performance (pageview speed)
• Server Resource Stingy
• Feature-Rich and Powerful
• Elegant and Easy To Administer
• eBay Policy Compliant
• Web Secure
• Reliable

There are other eBay plugins for WordPress, but with many of them, you may be unknowingly exposing yourself to some significant risks.

eBay Will Shut You Down In A Heartbeat

Many of these other plugins (maybe all of them?) use a shared App ID readily visible within the plugin code in direct (but unintentional, I’m sure) violation of the eBay Developer Program policies.

This App Id is the programmatic key within the plugin that eBay provided to the plugin developer to access eBay data.

Since everyone who downloads that plugin uses the same key, all of the plugin users better hope and pray that no one who downloaded the plugin will extract and abuse that key.  If it gets used in a malicious manner, eBay shuts you all down by disabling that key.  This is an important point if you view your blog as a serious enterprise.  See our better approach to the App ID here.

The eBay Listings On Your Blog May Disappear

Another risk with the shared App ID approach mentioned above is that all of the users of the plugin share one pool of 5,000 calls to eBay per day (API calls).  If all the users of that plugin drive enough combined traffic (and their corresponding calls to eBay to retrieve listings), then that pool of 5,000 calls can get used up.  When that happens, eBay can shut you down until the clock turns to 00:01 PST the next day.

With the Auction Thumbs design, you get your own personal pool of 5,000 calls a day to eBay!

We can even help get you approved for 1.5 million API calls per day for busy blogs!  This is because Auction Thumbs has passed the the official eBay  Compatible Application Check which no other eBay plugin has passed.

Each Pageview = Calls To eBay.com = Slow Blog

With other plugins, each time someone views a page of your blog, you are making one or more calls to eBay’s database.  These calls are not cheap when it comes to your blog’s server resources.  The data that comes back from eBay has to be processed one item at a time and turned into something that can display on your blog (HTML).

Do you really want to have your server resources processing data that generally doesn’t change on eBay for several days with each and every pageview ? Imagine the performance hit passed onto your site visitors as they wait for this processing to complete.

One of the popular free eBay plugins actually has an FAQ question stating that your blog will slow down due to the calls to eBay with each pageview.

With Auction Thumbs, we’ve included a cache that stores eBay product listings for 4 hours.  Imagine the reduction in server resources and site speed that results from having this data on the same server where your blog is, ready to be included on the page.

An added bonus:  Imagine how many saved eBay API calls in that pool of 5,000 if your blog only makes calls to eBay once every four hours instead of hundreds of times an hour.

We’re Industrial Strength

Auction Thumbs was designed to protect your investment, your server resources, and your user experience, all while keeping you in good standing with eBay.  We think those attributes are worth the investment in Auction Thumbs.

P.S. I used the Auction Thumbs’ post-level override of the global settings to fine tune the results below to go well with this post.  I felt that it was only fitting for the topic.

If you are unfamiliar with Auction Thumbs and want to learn more about it, be sure to read the Overview first.

Configuring the Default Search Criteria

Auction Thumbs has been configured on this blog to display eBay auction listings by searching the “Jewelry & Watches->Watches->Wristwatches” subcategory with keyword “dive” by default.

We can override this category/keyword combination on each blog post individually to suit the content of each post.  However, we are leaving this post with the defaults.

Control The Location Within The Post

Although we can configure Auction Thumbs to display the eBay listings at the top of the post content, we have opted for the “after post content” configuration here.

You control the size of the thumbnail images and quantity of the listings to display via the Auction Thumbs administrative screens.

More Sorting and Filtering Options

The listings that are displayed have been configured to sort by “Ending Soonest” and to include only those watches that exceed a minimum price of $30.  We have used the filter options to display only Auction, Fixed Price, and Store Inventory format listings.

The User Experience

Clicking on the right arrow in the Auction Thumbs window below will cause a smooth scroll action to slide to a second and subsequent page of listings.  With Auction Thumbs you can display an entire page worth of products in a single, scrollable row.

Continue the Tour with a Second Blog Post Using the Defaults