Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
Hunting for deals is fun. Yeah, i know it sounds weird, but there is a certain level of excitement in finding some wacky coupon combo that leads to a crazy price, or better yet – random free crap 🙂
Data entry is not fun, and far from exciting. And running Puke Alpha is mostly dealing with data entry. None of it is difficult, just annoying and time consuming. This is what ultimately doomed Puke Alpha V2. I didn’t want to put in the time required to do the daily grind through all the data entry. I would rather be hunting for deals, then wasting time waiting for yet another tab to load, so i can click yet another checkbox.
There is a way to streamline all of this, some through use of custom forms that eliminate all the unnecessary options, but it’s still all manual. The only way to automate things is to have access to an api that can pull data.
For Amazon, access to their api requires being one of their affiliates… which i’m not.
So…
When setting up Puke Alpha V3, i wasn’t doing it with the intention of it being “the main”. Twitter was supposed to handle that task. Puke Alpha’s job was to be a supplement, while it’s working it’s way through the bugs and improvements. Most importantly, it was a way to see how i can run the site without being ground down by the daily maintenance required. If Puke Alpha proved to be too much to deal with – it would be shut down, and most people wouldn’t care since most of the deals were posted on Twitter as “main” anyway.
The sudden loss of Twitter put a wrinkle in those plans, but that’s minor… it also pretty much devastated “The Plan”.
“The Plan” was to put some traffic through Puke Alpha during 11.11 sales, see what bugs pop up, and squash them the week after (as in now). All while doing some general clean up and polish to make the site look a little more presentable. This was all so i can apply to Amazon again, so i can gain access to their api. I specifically had Monday, the 21st set as the apply go-date.
As part of “The Plan”, but even more importantly as part of prep for Black Friday – i started using a plugin that gives me limited access to Amazon’s api. Limited is the operative word here, since this plugin doesn’t have all the features of the api, and comes with a limited number of calls. It’s meant to be used temporarily, while waiting for Amazon’s approval…. which is precisely what i’m doing.
This plugin eliminates about 90% off the manual data entry required to post a deal, so it already saves me a bunch of time. It also can check prices and stock, which means it should be possible to set up logic to auto expire deals (price goes up, deal is dead, etc). Expiring deals is another manual process that requires hunting for checkboxes in tabs. Having things auto expire would be incredibly helpful in reducing that grind.
I should have enough calls left in the quota (and if not i have a spare key, so there’s a bit more) to use it through Black Friday, and maybe a bit more. Which is great. Doing manual data entry for 5-6 items a day is not as bad as i’m making it out to be. But doing it for 30-50-100 items that all have their prices roll over at the stroke of midnight (aka Black Friday) is just not feasible without some kind of automated help.
Amazon typically takes about two weeks (usually way faster) to review a new affiliate account, so by the end of Black Friday i should know if i was approved. If yes, i can switch over the trial api to the real Amazon one, and continue running the site that way, which is the method i would prefer… and also the method that will most likely not see me give up on the thing long term. If not – i’ll have to figure out “some other way”.
I can tell you with full certainty that Amazon will not approve me. My first go around with them a year ago ended very, very, VERY badly. My chances for approval this time around were insanely slim to begin with, and relied mostly on having a “sizeable” following on Twitter (Amazon wants at least 500, i was closing in on a 1000). Without that follower count on Twitter – i’m screwed, and i know it.
The point of all this is – the tools i’m using to run the site right now are most likely not the tools i’m going to be using after Black Friday. Because of this, some of the time consuming fixes required to make these things better optimized are simply not worth investing time in right now.
The perfect example of it is notifications automation.
This is how i have things setup right now. New post goes up on the site, there is a two minute delay to give me a chance to catch a mistake, and then everything gets blasted off to “satellites”. I’ve tested Facebook and Reddit, and everything works. But it kind of works the same way that Telegram notifications work right now – there is a lot of gibberish, and formatting is somewhere between terrible and unreadable.
The big cause of the gibberish is the plugin i have been talking about. It does a great job of formatting a product card on the page (and a lot of other things), but the way it spits up info for a post excerpt is messy. There is a parser that can be setup to fix this. It’s not an incredibly difficult process, but it’s time consuming…. especially for someone like me doing it for the first time, and who doesn’t really know what he’s doing. When not using the plugin, and doing things manually, this problem simply doesn’t exist, or is at least nowhere near as bad. If i’m not using the plugin, there is no need for a parser.
So for now i’m skipping fixing automatic notifications entirely, and will simply post manually to Reddit and Facebook. Both are still brand new communities, in need of some love an attention, so it wouldn’t hurt if i spent some time in there anyway 🙂
Telegram will remain automatic… a bit gibberish, but automatic. I figure there should be at least one place that does it automatically, even if not in the best format.
Also…
While i’m applying to Amazon, i have to behave like an affiliate. This means absolutely no links to Amazon from anywhere outside this site. If a link goes to Amazon, it has to be clicked from here, and from here only. This is exactly the thing that lead to the head chopping i got last year, so it’s an absolute must. And absolutely no screenshots of any kind. Amazon doesn’t allow them, and if by some chance a Prime logo appears anywhere – it’s all over. A team of bald headed Jeff Bezos attack clones will be Prime delivered to my house overnight to “take care of things” 🙂
So… to summarize.
“The Plan” i had went to shit. I’m going to continue using the new plugin through Black Friday to make data entry feasible, while my application with Amazon is pending. There is no way Amazon is approving me without Twitter (and the follower count i had there), so the plugin is a temporary tool, which is most likely not going to be used a couple of weeks from now anyway. Any changes/modifications that have anything to do with this plugin (like the way notifications are presented) are simply not worth dealing with now, so they will wait until i know where i stand with Amazon (or until the end of Black Friday), and then i’ll figure things out from there.
Overall, i’ve been spending all my free time doing “this” lately, and barely had a chance to look for deals. No matter how tight the integration, how fast the automation, and how nice the presentation is – ultimately these things matter little, if there are no deals being posted. None of you are here for “this”. You’re here to catch a crazy deal on something awesome, and maybe even possibly get lucky and score some random free crap… so i’m going to get back to doing a lot more of that instead of “this” 🙂
That’s it for now… more updates coming.
