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Do you know the potential risks you’re taking with most eBay plugins out there? Many of them are breaking eBay’s rules and partnership agreement. What does this mean to you? It could mean that your listings disappear, or worse – you get banned from eBay’s affiliate program.
Auction Thumbs is different. We are the WordPress blogging professional’s choice for an eBay WordPress plugin. We’ve put a lot of consideration into making the Auction Thumbs design…
- High Performance (pageview speed)
- Server Resource Stingy
- Feature-Rich and Powerful
- Elegant and Easy To Administer
- eBay Policy Compliant
- Web Secure
- Reliable
There are other eBay plugins for WordPress, but with many of them, you may be unknowingly exposing yourself to some significant risks.
eBay Will Shut You Down In A Heartbeat
Many of these other plugins (maybe all of them?) use a shared App ID readily visible within the plugin code in direct (but unintentional, I’m sure) violation of the eBay Developer Program policies.
This App Id is the programmatic key within the plugin that eBay provided to the plugin developer to access eBay data.
Since everyone who downloads that plugin uses the same key, all of the plugin users better hope and pray that no one who downloaded the plugin will extract and abuse that key. If it gets used in a malicious manner, eBay shuts you all down by disabling that key. This is an important point if you view your blog as a serious enterprise. See our better approach to the App ID here.
The eBay Listings On Your Blog May Disappear
Another risk with the shared App ID approach mentioned above is that all of the users of the plugin share one pool of 5,000 calls to eBay per day (API calls). If all the users of that plugin drive enough combined traffic (and their corresponding calls to eBay to retrieve listings), then that pool of 5,000 calls can get used up. When that happens, eBay can shut you down until the clock turns to 00:01 PST the next day.
With the Auction Thumbs design, you get your own personal pool of 5,000 calls a day to eBay!
We can even help get you approved for 1.5 million API calls per day for busy blogs! This is because Auction Thumbs has passed the the official eBay Compatible Application Check which no other eBay plugin has passed.
Each Pageview = Calls To eBay.com = Slow Blog
With other plugins, each time someone views a page of your blog, you are making one or more calls to eBay’s database. These calls are not cheap when it comes to your blog’s server resources. The data that comes back from eBay has to be processed one item at a time and turned into something that can display on your blog (HTML).
Do you really want to have your server resources processing data that generally doesn’t change on eBay for several days with each and every pageview ? Imagine the performance hit passed onto your site visitors as they wait for this processing to complete.
One of the popular free eBay plugins actually has an FAQ question stating that your blog will slow down due to the calls to eBay with each pageview.
With Auction Thumbs, we’ve included a cache that stores eBay product listings for 4 hours. Imagine the reduction in server resources and site speed that results from having this data on the same server where your blog is, ready to be included on the page.
An added bonus: Imagine how many saved eBay API calls in that pool of 5,000 if your blog only makes calls to eBay once every four hours instead of hundreds of times an hour.
We’re Industrial Strength
Auction Thumbs was designed to protect your investment, your server resources, and your user experience, all while keeping you in good standing with eBay. We think those attributes are worth the investment in Auction Thumbs.
P.S. I used the Auction Thumbs’ post-level override of the global settings to fine tune the results below to go well with this post. I felt that it was only fitting for the topic.
