Popshops Review

I recently learned of a great company called PopShops where you can get several million affiliate products listed in one spot.

You pay a monthly fee of $5 to to $60 (I use the $30 plan), and can quickly search and assemble targeted feeds that are used very easily with wordpress. They do not charge any affiliate commissions, just the monthly fee.

For wordpress, you create a page, then link the feed to that page. Or, you can put random feeds on your posts/pages. It's somewhat tedious to click and create 100s of pages (1 page = 1 feed, which can be up to 100 items, not 1 page per item), so I wrote a script that creates pages and categories for me in wordpress. All that is left is to connect the feed (created in popshops.com tools) to the page you already have in wordpress.

The interface is a bit clunky as it's just a drop down list so if you have 200 feeds like me, you have to go through them a few times scanning to find the right feed to link to the page.

The good:

• There is a free, very limited version that allows you to setup 500 items and see how it works- but no customization.
• You get approved easier through them it seems instead of just a single cj or linkshare account for example.
• it's very easy, the hardest part is cutting and pasting affiliate IDs
• most support questions were thoroughly answered
• it's fast: I can have a site feed setup in literally 10 minutes with tens of items per page.
• it's easy to find related products, and the application process is mostly automated
• management is easy - feeds are auto updated for you.
• they give you a wordpress plugin that makes everything point and click
• You can recycle your feeds once you create them. So if you have 2 similar sites you can sell the same product line on both of them.

The bad:

• it was down a few times (I don't know for how long exactly)
• $30 a month is hard to swallow for newbies
• Custom formatting and layouts of the shops are difficult
• there is quite a bit of tedious clicking, it could be automated a bit more, like saving preferences (it still beats typing code though)
• it still takes me about 20 hours to completely research and setup a 2000 item shop - but hey that's not that bad....
• learning curve was about 10 hours to figure out how everything worked, including wordpress plugins, naming conventions, search paraments, widget options, etc.

All in all I would recommend this if you are not a total beginner, or if you are willing to put in about 30 to 40 hours learning and setting up your first major shop (though a smaller one could probably be done in a few hours if you understand the basics of wordpress and niche research).

Doh! I almost forgot, here is the link to http://popshops.com if you want to try their services.

Edit: popshops and most other affiliate feeds like this haven't been worth the effort. For SEO it's dead, profit is negligible and you basically funnel your traffic to another vendor. I wouldn't recommend any service that does this, popshops or other - even if someone later drops by to revive a completely dead, 3 year old thread with their "offer".