What's the problem?
The RSS feeds that draw products from your Zazzle store (or the Market Place) can include your referrer id (aka associate id) but Zazzle doesn't give you a way to get them to include a tracking code.[If you're unsure about feeds, see the end of this post for a brief explanation]
What's the solution?
I use Yahoo!Pipes to do this. This facility allows you to manipulate feeds in all sorts of ways. Now isn't the time to describe these pipes, as all I want to do is to give you a solution.For this solution you need to have a Yahoo account - you'll have one if you have a Yahoo email address.
This is what the solution looks like:
So assuming you have a Yahoo account, follow this link:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=56207baf503a3f83c963eed502e396de
and you'll see the above. Click the "clone" button (highlighted below):
and you'll see your cloned copy:
Now all you have to do is fill in what you want and click the "Run Pipe" button. Here's what my example looks like after I've run the pipe:
Right click "Get as RSS" and copy the link location. You now have your RSS feed url, where the items returned will include your rf id and tracking code.
Here's the feed I get when I do this:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=56207baf503a3f83c963eed502e396de&_render=rss&myBackgroundColour=ffffff&myImageSize=350&myQueryString=dogs&myReferrerId=238582202591969585&myStorename=hightonridley&myTrackingCode=RazaBlog
If you're using Firefox then when you click the link you'll see the feed - and when you hover over any of the links you'll see that both the rf id and tracking code are in place.
Chrome and Safari (others?) won't show the actual feed but will show a bunch of gobble-de-gook (the XML specification of the feed, rather than the feed itself).
So wherever you would use a Zazzle RSS feed (FeederNinja, IFTTT etc.) you can use the feed url produced by your pipe in its place.
Happy Zazzling!
Limitations
Your account is limited to 200 pipe runs per hour. If you've got more than one pipe, this limit is spread amongst them.Zazzle feeds - a quick explanation
How to get a Zazzle RSS feed
The simplest feed about dogs that returns products from my store is http://feed.zazzle.com/hightonridley/rss?qs=dogsWhen the feed does its work and returns a bunch of products, the links used in each will look something like this:
http://www.zazzle.com/dog_grooming_service_business_card_template-240522596967847879
If someone follows one of those links and then buys something, I'll get the normal royalty fee but I won't get the referral fee. To get the referral fee, I need to include my referrer id in the link as well.
Here's what a link looks like with my referrer id included:
http://www.zazzle.com/dog_grooming_service_business_card_template-240522596967847879?rf=238582202591969585
You can see the referrer id is right there on the end: rf=238582202591969585
How to get a referrer id included in the links
You do this by including your referrer id in the Zazzle RSS feed request url, like this:http://feed.zazzle.com/hightonridley/rss?qs=dogs&at=238582202591969585
So placing at=238582202591969585 is the way you tell the feed to include rf=238582202591969585 in the product links.
So now you should have an outline understanding of (Zazzle) RSS Feeds. For more, I suggest a quick Google search / visit to Wikipedia's topic on RSS feeds.
comments, likes, +1s, tweets are always welcome! :)
