Adding affiliate products in categories

[wolfear]

I hope I have posted this in the right area.
I am almost positive I read how to do this somewhere, but I be darned if I can find it now (my system crashed and I lost all my bookmarks) and my searches to day haven't turned up what I am looking for.
Several of the affilaite programs we have joined offer a full-html page for displaying the products, as opposed to simply a side-box link, and I am trying to find the best method of displaying these in our store along side the other products we offer, i.e.- if it's a 3D animator software affiliate, show the product in the software category as a regular product, but without the "buy now" link since the customer would be using the encoded affiliate link to purchase.
This method is preferrable to adding as a standard product since most are specialized graphics software and the pages are already content optimized descriptions which use flash or java to display features, which will (hopefully) enhance our conversions.
I would prefer to not use the general documents product type since that displays in the documents as opposed to product categories, and I can't seem to wrap my brain around creating a new product type.
Any input on how to accomplish this is greatly appreciated.

[Kim]

You can use the document product and turn off the add to cart- but doesn't the link send your customer offsite? Is that wise?

[wolfear]

Thanks for the reply. I had been thinking that document product what what i wanted, but i guess i got my self confused over what I was looking at.
I'll get there eventually...lol

True, this is not the best method, but at the moment it is the most practical as the only other option we have is to purchase resale rights to the software, which is not financially viable at this time since that would run into several $1000's.

Even using side boxes/banners still takes a customer away from the site. At least this way they stay long enough to read the product description and don't click off our site only to find that the link what not what they wanted after all.

So, it's the lesser of 2 evils, either we can offer the software and take a percentage of off site sales and hope the customer returns to purchase the add-ons we hope will soon be available to us, or not offer it at all, and miss out on the potential extra revenue when the customer must go elsewhere to find the software.

Once again, thanks for the reply..you folks on here are great!!

[Ajeh]

Not sure if you noticed but the banners have settings for open in new window that might be of help to you ...

[wolfear]

Thanks Ajeh, I do use that feature already, although I had forgotten about it.
Well...unless i have goofed up somewhere, this looks like a no win deal ... I added 2 trial product as "document product", put my code in the description box, and the whole page shows up in the product listing, so now my page is 5 miles long. Not good.
I must be doing something wrong..this can't possibly be this difficult.
In the meantime, I guess we'll go with just using the general documents and hope people are smart enough to figure it out.
Thanks for all the help.

[wolfear]

Well..nevermind on that one...General Documents is same issue as Products.
This may not be possible to do with out a major headache.
It's Miller time and I quit for the day. I'll start fresh in the morning.
Thakns once again.

[Nictech]

Wow! Just the thread I have been searching for.

I am trying to work out an affiliate solution similar to wolfear.

I have a new install of v 1.3 sitting on the server and want to use the EZ Pages stuffed full of affiliate content with links to the affiliate.

I only have one product of my own and a hundred affiliate products which make up most of my sales.

I want to display the affiliate content for search engine reasons but my current setup using 1.2.7 the pages are not getting indexed. They are using extra pages and other add ons that do not get found by the bots.

The whole upgrade/rebuild is pointless if the EZ pages content does not get indexed.

Been beating my head on the screen for days now to come up with a solution, maybe someone has ideas.

Any ideas are welcomed, good, bad or crazy.

The site is hypnosis in my sig.

[wolfear]

Nictech-
I did a temporary listing using product documents and doing some cut & paste with code snippets from several links to make a "full" listing. Several could not be done as they only provided the full page which couldn't be "condensed" and still work properly.
I'm not thrilled with the results, but at least they are up and visable.
I hope to work on this in more depth when i get a free moment to figure out the "easiest" way to get this accomplished.
If I get something workable in the near future, I'll make sure to post it here.
I can't say for sure when since we are still trying to recover from a hardware failure.