Zazzle Storekeepers: How can Yahoo! Pipes help?

I said a few days ago that I'd introduce you to Yahoo! Pipes: pipes.yahoo.com

First, what is it? 

Yahoo! Pipes (Y!P from now on) is a tool that lets you manipulate RSS Feeds. And for those not familiar with RSS Feeds, these are lists of stuff (e.g. news items, products from your store, lists of blog posts) that follow a particular layout / structure.

What sorts of things can you do with it?

General stuff

From the very simple, like sorting the list in various ways, to the more powerful, like filtering out posts with specific keywords, manipulating its content in various ways, only showing the list if it's between certain times of day.
The thing I really like about it is that you drag out onto a canvas the various modules you want to work with, and join them up with, well, pipes (and hence the name).

Here's what one looks like while designing:

You can see that this one takes the simplest possible Zazzle RSS Feed, sorts it on the date each product was made and then outputs it. You can see the first few items in the list (feed) it produces in the debugger section at the bottom.
On the left you can see a list of the sorts of 'modules' you can use in designing your Y!P.

Zazzle-specific stuff

If you're a storekeeper or affiliate marketer you'll seriously like what it can do for you:

• Build Zazzle feed requests to draw items out of the market place, yours or others' stores
• Combine Zazzle feeds into one
• Add tracking codes to all links in each list item
• Get copy-and-paste code for slide shows for blogs or websites

..and all fully automatically!

The Power of Two

But much more than this, you'll be amazed at what you can achieve when you use Y!P in conjunction with the IfThisThenThat tool I mentioned last time. www.ifttt.com

• Post specific items to your blog
• Notify yourself by email whenever the most popular item in a department changes
• Tweet new sales in your store
• Change your status or post links on your Facebook timeline
• ...and so much more on many more social sites

Have a look at this blog's posts for the sorts of end results you can achieve. Which ones were created by Y!P it conjunction with IFTTT? I'll leave you to figure it out :)

Be aware of...

• Note that there is a limitation with Y!P: you can only have a maximum of 200 runs of your pipes per hour - exceed this and you'll have to wait for two hours before it resets.
• IFTTT "recipes" - the way you use your Y!P output to do stuff - run every 15 minutes or so and react only to new items added to the list (RSS feed).

What next?

Watch out for further posts that give more specific examples of free tools that can greatly assist your promotion efforts - all automatically!