I just got accepted to an affiliate program that fits my niche. Now, I need to build a site around it, but I have two problems.

1. They told me to get all the product info and images off of their site. While that is cool, it's about 500 products across 50 pages. Whats the best program or script to use to grab all of this content without having to spend days doing it manually?

2. The products are downloadable demos. The URL's all go back to their domain. I don't want my clients to see them so they will keep coming back to me. What's the best program to manage this collection of products, especially with SEF in mind and a unique page for each product.

I know scrappers are frowned upon, but I actually have permission. Wish they had made this easier. :/

They don't happen to have a froogle feed do they?
You could more easily grab that.

Also, maybe you can speak with their webmaster?

I didn't think about contacting the webmaster, but it's worth a shot. I guess it just made sense to me that they would offer a download with everything I needed. Telling me to grab the images off of their site seemed kind of silly. Then again, they may not have many affiliates that want to push all 500+ products. :-)

BTW, can PHPLinkDirectory do URL cloaking? All of the products are direct download and I would like to hide that fact from my customers. I thought PHPLinkDirectory actually might be good as a front end for this.

Thanks!

good question. Let me see what I can find.

wget --mirror?

I don't exactly what it is you're wanting to grab, is it the web pages?

The images for sure. The description would be nice too.

I never thought about wget. I use it all the time to grab downloads for my servers. Hmmm....

wget will most likely help with grabbing the images. The descriptions, I don't see how it would be possible to grab them as I haven't seen anything in PHP or a script that will let you grab text from other servers...

I'll be on a lookout for one as this seems like a handy tool that I could also use for one of my sites.

I would write a perl script to parse out the data.

ACK! Must not write RegEx.........!

I never got into Perl and I hate doing Regular Expressions....

Besides, I know there are programs out there already that do this. Why reinvent the wheel?

I can't imagine they couldn't provide you with the information in at least a word doc. I just started a website drop-shipping products and they provided me with word doc with descriptions, excel docs with pricing and shipping info, and a zip file with all the high res images.

Beley,

I completely agree. I think the problem is most of their affiliates sell a few of their products. They talk about getting the top producers. I just happen to have a nice niche for their products and thought I would sell them all. I may just start with a few and work my way up from there. There site and products look great, but once I got in on the affiliate program, it was like something I coded on my first website. Very basic.

I still need to ask their webmaster if he has a zip or something.

I also understand peoples reluctance to actually recommend a product. I swear, this is 100% legitimate. I'll work something out.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

I can write a script for you if you're interested.