One of my favorite things about Share a Sale is their Make a Page tool.  Make a Page enables you to make a storefront out of products with variables that you define instantly, and without having to know how to code.  In this post I will show you how to use the datafeed tool as well as what you will want to do and change to get the most out of it as a Merchant and as an Affiliate.  You can also use this post for your program if it is on a different network as most offer datafeed tools now.  You should also read my Datafeeds post to really get the most out of this tool. (On a side note, this post is a pre-post to help with a post going live next week.)

How to use the Share a Sale Make a Page Tool.

1.  Log into Share a Sale.
2.  Scroll over tools and then click on the red and blue chalkboard icon that says Make a Page.

3.  Now select the Merchant you want to use from one of the two drop downs.  (One downside to the Share a Sale Make a Page tool is hat you cannot combine Merchant’s feeds).  I like the one in the top left most because it makes it easier for me and because it’s the list that I am used to using.  There isn’t actually a large difference though.  Then click go.

4.  Now in the top section select which variables (Categories and Subcategories) you want to sort by.  Merchants, this is the custom columns.  You can do things like mens, womens, colors, sizes, categories, subcategories, weight, price range, etc…  By filling out the custom columns you can make your feed better for your Affiliates and they can better promote you.  Affiliates, this helps you target your pages and storefronts down even more to create better pages for your audience.

5.  For keywords, select keywords you want to pull from the feed like men’s, women’s, a color or product type.  Merchants, this is why it’s important to name everything, fill out your descriptions and every other item in your feed.  Affiliates, select “and” if you want all terms together or select “or” if you want any combination or product that uses that term.  I always use “or” because selecting “and” usually doesn’t return many results.   There are also advanced criteria you can use as an Affiliate, but it also depends on how well the Merchant has their feed.  I usually ignore these fields.

6.  Now you fill out how many products you want per  page by replacing the 15 with whatever number you want.  (The storefront will only pull as many meet your criteria though).  How you’d like the products to be sorted, the order of the products as well as how to customize the make a page with a border, colors, fonts, etc….

7.  Now fill out the display fields section to choose what you’d like to show in the actual storefront like large images or small images, short or long descriptions (selected by characters for short.  If you go by characters, you’ll need to read the descriptions because you could end up with broken words and phrases since it ends after a certain amount of characters regardless of punctuation.), product prices, etc…  Merchants, make sure to have all of your images properly sized to be the same width and height.   This is extremely important so that your Affiliates get good looking storefronts that don’t break their pages.  You also want to make sure your thumbnails are thumbnails 50×50 to 100×100 (small images) and the big images are reasonably sized no larger than 300×300 or 500×500.

8.  Now click on the View Results button.

9.  Now you have all of your pages ready to copy and paste.  Choose which page you want by clicking on the numbers in the top and then click anywhere in the box with the code.

10.  Now select all and copy the code then go to your website or blog and paste the code into your site.

That is how you can create a storefront using the Share a Sale make a page tool.  It only takes a minute or two and you can have a store front on your site that will help your users to find relevant products and help you to generate more sales.  You can use a make a page storefront in blog posts, as their own pages or even in an email.  The Share a Sale Make a Page tool is a great free tool to help you drive more sales as an Affiliate.