Price Tapestry -novice questions

[stellar73]

Hoping someone can help....I've been considering buying a Price Tapestry licence specifically to use with Wordpress but being a novice with affiliate sites I'm a bit confused...

I assume I'm right in saying that I will need approval to join the various affiliate networks before I can get access to their data feeds? On the other hand to get this approval I will presumably need to submit details of at least one fully functioning site to them. My main question is how I can design the site and test the Price Tapestry functionality within it without having to be pre-approved with the networks (ie it seems like a bit of a chicken and egg situation as obviously one thing needs to come first)....is there such a thing as a dummy datafeed for example?

Also - at the moment all the Wordpress templates I have are from Studio Press (I bought their Genesis framework with all the child themes)....does anyone know if PT will work with these?

Any other opinions on its usefulness or otherwise would be welcomed. The site I want to build is to sell tea products (fine teas, gifts, teapots, caddies etc) and I would want to combine a reasonably large ( ie 100 or so) range of products in diff categories with decent text write ups and images

 

[dazc]

80% of merchants will approve you on the most basic of information about your site so I wouldn't worry about that.
What I would worry about is how on earth are you going to get visitors to this site in the first place?
Yes pt will work with any wordpress site including genesis but it is one heck of a learning curve so I wouldn't bother with datafeeds until I knew I had at least a reasonable number of vistors first.

 

[stellar73]

80% of merchants will approve you on the most basic of information about your site so I wouldn't worry about that.
What I would worry about is how on earth are you going to get visitors to this site in the first place?

Thanks Dazc, I didnt think approval was that easy so that' s good to know!
Strange as it may sound I'm not too worried about visitor numbers initially..... it's more of a technical exercise for now to see if I can get the mechanics of it together....I do have more obvious exact match domains I would have used instead of this one if money/ visitors was more of an urgent concern....

Yes pt will work with any wordpress site including genesis but it is one heck of a learning curve so I wouldn't bother with datafeeds until I knew I had at least a reasonable number of visitors first.

I appreciate what you're saying but if I dont have the datafeeds established first isnt that a bit like opening a shop and not stocking the shelves?

 

[dazc]

Thanks Dazc, I didnt think approval was that easy so that' s good to know!
Strange as it may sound I'm not too worried about visitor numbers initially..... it's more of a technical exercise for now to see if I can get the mechanics of it together....I do have more obvious exact match domains I would have used instead of this one if money/ visitors was more of an urgent concern....

The basic pt set up will work out of the box and there is a wordpress plug-in that isn't too difficult to set up.
So in this respect you can achieve what you want fairly quickly.

The difficult part at first is sorting all the different feeds and merging various categories, etc. No merchant makes it easy because one will have a category for each kind of tea, one will have just one for tea and another will have their tea under food and drink or something useless like that

I appreciate what you're saying but if I dont have the datafeeds established first isnt that a bit like opening a shop and not stocking the shelves?

Yes it is but you can start with just one basic feed and build on that. Just remember that your shop as you describe it is nothing more than a script and a few data feeds that anyone can replicate. It's what you add to it that makes the difference.

 

[rharper83]

Sorry for the minor thread hijack! Does anyone know whether you can transfer PT licenses between people?

I bought a license a couple of years ago, and tried it out on my local pc, but it wasn't ever really what I wanted. I left it too long to take advantage of the money-back deal.

If David (author of PT) allows, would anyone be interested in buying my license from me? I'll consider offers, of the mid to high £1xx region (ie, £170ish?)

Thanks,

Rich