1) Register on our site. It’s quick and painless, and we only need a valid e-mail address so we can contact you if there’s a problem. Registering gets you assigned a UserID, which is one part of your authentication process. Unless you’re creating your own feeds (see question below), you can safely ignore your UserID.
2) If you’re a Premium user and an eBay affiliate, enter your campaign ID(s) in your Profile, so we can further verify it’s you when we receive your link requests. Additionally, without a campaign ID designated, your links won’t be getting ePN credit!
3) Armed with your UserID, proceed to convert / build your own feed links that point to us (see below), or head over to the Feed Generator and build one here!
var $eb_base = “http://rest.ebay.com/epn/v1/find/item.rss?”;
to
var $eb_base = “https://www.auctionrequest.com/arfeed.php?uid=[AUCTIONREQUEST USERID]&”;
where [AUCTIONREQUEST USERID] is your AuctionRequest UserID from your profile, without brackets.
For the WordPress version of the phpBay plugin, the edit is in /wp-content/plugins/phpbay/lang/english.php, near the bottom:
define(“PB_EPN_RSS_URL”, “http://rest.ebay.com/epn/v1/find/item.rss?”);
to
define(“PB_EPN_RSS_URL”, “https://www.auctionrequest.com/arfeed.php?uid=[AUCTIONREQUEST USERID]&”);
In addition to these edits, you’ll need to be on the Premium tier with all your ePN campaign ID(s) entered in your Profile here for you to receive affiliate credit.
However, as this plugin has been abandoned by its author, we do not recommend its use and cannot provide any support for it; instead, we point you to one of the solutions featured on our front page.
The Premium tier is designed for eBay affiliate marketers. You have the ability to select from any of your ePN campaign IDs to add to your links. You can turn on or off Link Cloaking and Geotargeting. Your auction results will update every 5 minutes. And, you can add a Custom ID to your links to assist you in tracking commissions. Premium users can also view their recent API usage and click-thru statistics.
Geotargeting is the ability to correctly route a buyer (someone who clicks the eBay auction you’re displaying) to their home country’s eBay. If you host a blog in the United States, and a user from Italy clicks one of your displayed auctions, Geotargeting ensures that they’re taken to www.ebay.it where they can see the item in their home language and currency. They’re much more likely to complete the sale or bid on the item. “But wait!” you say. “eBay’s had that feature for years with their RSS results!” Actually, they haven’t, even though they say they did – none of the links they generated actually geotargeted, even with the popular “&lgeo=1” tag added by default. They routed everyone to the eBay region set by the owner of the blog where the results were displayed, which was usually the owner’s home region. Our service can correctly identify where a user is “clicking” from, and route the request to the appropriate eBay. Premium users can switch this feature off at their discretion – some of your users may be behind a VPN or Tor exit node, which would disguise their location and possibly even their country. For those users, Geotargeting them runs the risk of sending them to the wrong eBay region. However, also keep in mind that eBay has stated that the affiliate tracking cookie that is dropped for a user does not transfer between regions – if they land on eBay.com, but then move over to eBay.it to complete their purchase, you won’t be getting a commission.
For Premium users, Geotargeting requires that your links also be Cloaked (as both features require routing the “click” through our server). You can, however, disable Geotargeting but still leave Cloaking on.
1) Register on our site. It’s quick and painless, and we only need a valid e-mail address so we can contact you if there’s a problem. Registering gets you a UserID, which you’ll need to put in your feed links. If you’re an eBay affiliate, enter your campaign ID(s) in your Profile, so we can further verify it’s you when we receive your link requests (and without a campaign ID designated, you won’t get ePN credit for your clicks!).
2) Replace the first part of your feed URL: http://rest.ebay.com/epn/v1/find/item.rss? with this: https://www.auctionrequest.com/arfeed.php?uid=(your Auction Request ID here)& (don’t forget the “&” at the end). That’s it! Your feeds will work perfectly without any interruption, or any of your users being the wiser. We don’t actually need a lot of the junk that eBay put in your feed link, but it doesn’t hurt to send it to us; we’ll extract the info we need. Remember that for Free users, your “campid” parameter (if any) will not be returned in the results we generate.
To give your searches the best possible results, use the parentheses OR syntax like so: rural (carrier, carriers) (sign, signs) to cover different possible pluralization of terms.
Using syntax, you have a much more granular control of what you’re searching for. Hopefully this little chart explains it simply, along with the symbols to use:
AND: great smoky mountains
OR: (great, smoky, mountains)
AND/OR: great (smoky, mountains)
EXCEPT: great smoky –mountains
EXACT: “great smoky mountains”
• Providing larger pictures in results and/or a picture-size selector (will require plugin/reader support)
• Additional advanced statistics on click-thrus, such as originating IP address, date & time of click, eBay region routed to, etc – downloadable as a CSV text file
• We can possibly display more search results than the current limit of 100, but this would require plugin pagination support, as well as a good sense of how many people this would benefit (honestly, 100 seems to be enough, but if you’re itching for more, please let us know!)
• Additional sort option Most Bids
• Importing your ePN campaign IDs to your profile (for those with many campaigns!) via text file
• Language localization for the website here
• “IP Intel” for Premium users, to attempt to identify VPN / Tor users and un-geotarget them. This would be a paid service that we’d have to subscribe to, so we’d have to weigh the benefits of this
We’d love to hear your suggestions on how we could improve, complaints, or praise, at our contact form. We can’t promise the moon, but we’ll certainly endeavor to give you the best possible product as time and finances allow.
Once cancelled you’ll be on the paid tier until the subscription ends.