Build Affiliate Web Store Using Commission Junction API

Recently one of my clients asked me question about affiliate web stores and how they work. I have been involved in creating affiliate mashup webstore creation for quite some time now. I have created mashup web stores based on Amazon, Ebay, Google etc. affiliate programs. And lot of these stores have been very successful in generating decent revenue for clients. Lately I got introduced to Commission Junction affiliate program by a new client. This client was looking into creating a web store based on Commission Junction web services. In this post I will provide some information on how to use Commission Junction web services to create a targetted web store.

Get Started

• As with every affiliate program, first you need to sign up with Commission Junction affiliate program. Click here to get started with sign up.
• Now you need a develop key from Commission Junction to access their API. It is a simple process. Go to CJ Webservices page and register for a developer key. After completing this step, the key will be sent to your mail box as well as displayed on the page. Save it and keep it safe.

Build The Site

Now that you have completed the registration process and everything, you are all set to build the site. As with any application or web site, you will need data to show some content and products on the site. The data is going to come from Commission Junction web services. Commission Junction provides REST services to access following kind of data.

• Products
• Links
• Advertisers
• Categories

These are bread and butter of making the site. There are some other services available as well. But for now you can focus on these only. You will need to build an API or some sort of agent that can consume REST services to access the data from Commission Junction web service. Since I am mostly doing .Net development these days, so I have a built a nice handy library that hides all the implementation details and downloads the data from web service and makes it available to the web site. You can Contact Me if you are looking into using .Net API.

Now that you have the data, you will need to think about what type of products or category you want to target to build your store. You have all the data for all the categories from advertisers that you signed up for. But that does not mean that you want to create some store that is going to market all type of products. Well, I am not saying that you can not do that. But it is always better to concentrate on one or two categories. That makes it easier for you to create some focused marketing and promotion plan for your web site.

I created a mash up store where I am marketting all products from all advertisers. You can see how the landing page shows all the coupons and deals of the day from all the vendors and then you can navigate to each page to see how the product page combines links, coupons and product list data to display information to user. Click below to see the store in action.

Affiliate Webstore Demo