Robin Majumdar 2.0

Whew, that was one lengthy title. Well as you may have read here in the past, I really have enjoyed working with phpFoX on a few client sites. It sells itself a bit too much as an easy way to build your own MySpace or FaceBook type of social network site … while that is true, any seasoned veteran of building communities will know that the tool itself is the easy part.

The last time Konsort announced a discount coupon offer was around this time a year ago, and it was 30% off the regular price of about $299 - a pretty nice instant savings. I’ve been keeping my eyes open but haven’t seen any announcements about a discount yet.

That being said, phpFoX is definitely a mature product and has a serious community around the development of 3rd party add-ons. The Konsort group announced the final version of phpFoX 1.6.20 release back in February and there has been only one significant patch since then. That’s a pretty impressive track record given that so many companies rush new versions to RTM and then bury us helpless site managers with a bevy of bug fixes in days and weeks after. Not so with phpFoX consort… nice work guys.

As always, if you have any available licenses, leave a comment below (with your email in the comments form which is never revealed on this site) and I’ll be in touch.

Final note: Konsort offers an excellent affiliate program for phpFox.

Well, after many years of managing the various eBay affiliate programs through Commission Junction, I was one of the first to migrate campaigns over to their new in-house eBay Partner Network at the beginning of the month.

I’ll write an indepth analysis after a couple more weeks of usage, but thus far it’s been working relatively smoothly although eCPM and CTR numbers seem to be somewhat lower than back on the CJ eBay program (which is still running in parallel until the end of the month) … Mind you, the lower performance probably has nothing to do with tracking issues, and more with the cyclical nature of the sites on which some of these campaigns are running. Over at AuctionAds ShoppingAds, which provides the now famous user friendly widget creation system, April was the best month in terms of $ revenue in the last few months.

I just received this notice from the eBay Partner Network:

From: eBay Partner Network Customer Support [mailto:noreply@ebaypartnernetwork.com]
Sent: April 25, 2008 5:10 PM
To: ***************
Subject: Customer Support messaging issues on 4/22 and 4/23

Our Customer Support system experienced issues on Tuesday, 4/22 and Wednesday, 4/23.
If you submitted a question on those days, our system might not have logged it. Please resubmit your inquiry to ensure a prompt follow up.

Our apologies for the inconvenience,

The eBay Partner Network team

OK, so their service desk software is having a few glitches… no worries guys. Migrating such a complex affiliate program over from a third-party provider to your in-house system is one major project!

Hopefully my eCPM numbers will go up soon on the new EPN