Amazon Affiliate - WooZone users READ THIS!

Hello. I'm building an Amazon Affiliate store and use WooZone to import products.
There seems to be a major problem though.

The prices.

They don't get updated in reality. I've done some research and found many many sites that use WooZone. All of them (including mine) display the prices that were current when the product was imported to their site.
They may SEEM to be updated saying something like : "(as of January 31, 2016, 12:08 pm)" but in reality they are not.
They are the SAME prices that you had when you first imported the products.
Check your site and you will see it, check several products and compare them with Amazon's.

This is against Amazon's terms and many people got banned for this over time as I've read in the forum and other sites.
Also, having different prices than Amazon currently has, gives you bad credibility and reputation so you won't get any returning visitors/potential buyers.

Imagine a person, knowing nothing about Affiliate marketing, adds a product that's $10 in the basket, gets redirected to Amazon to checkout and pay and sees the actual current price is $20. I'd personally cancel the order and never look back again.

I've contacted AA-Team that released WooZone but has offered no solution to this yet.
The solutions that the plugin's developers suggest as creating custom cronjob, do NOT work and make no difference. Only updates the date, nothing else.
The auto-update feature is there but it's USELESS.

Anyway, this is very very frustrating and discouraging.

So, if anyone reading this has a solution let me know!
Thanks.

i have the same problems and i search for alternative :/
i think the prosociate is a good alternative

I think Prosociate has the same issue from videos I have seen.
It's a pity though because I paid $66 for the WooZone bundle pack.
There has to be a solution because many people use this!

Cyberdemon87 said:

Hello. I'm building an Amazon Affiliate store and use WooZone to import products.
There seems to be a major problem though.

The prices.

They don't get updated in reality. I've done some research and found many many sites that use WooZone. All of them (including mine) display the prices that were current when the product was imported to their site.
They may SEEM to be updated saying something like : "(as of January 31, 2016, 12:08 pm)" but in reality they are not.
They are the SAME prices that you had when you first imported the products.
Check your site and you will see it, check several products and compare them with Amazon's.

This is against Amazon's terms and many people got banned for this over time as I've read in the forum and other sites.
Also, having different prices than Amazon currently has, gives you bad credibility and reputation so you won't get any returning visitors/potential buyers.

Imagine a person, knowing nothing about Affiliate marketing, adds a product that's $10 in the basket, gets redirected to Amazon to checkout and pay and sees the actual current price is $20. I'd personally cancel the order and never look back again.

I've contacted AA-Team that released WooZone but has offered no solution to this yet.
The solutions that the plugin's developers suggest as creating custom cronjob, do NOT work and make no difference. Only updates the date, nothing else.
The auto-update feature is there but it's USELESS.

Anyway, this is very very frustrating and discouraging.

So, if anyone reading this has a solution let me know!
Thanks.

Click to expand...

I use WooZone on 4 sites and agree that the prices can be all over the place. It was not like this with earlier versions. I am not sure if the issue is with WooZone or the way the Amazon Advertising API provides the information in buckets.

As for the cron jobs it does work although you need to set it up correctly. Follow WooZone's instructions and make sure you change your config file. Keep in mind that the cron job will only run if you your site is visited. You can get around this by using a cron service to trigger your cron job on a regular basis.

My experience with WooZone is a love hate situation. So far I have not found a better plugin for the price and the opportunities it provides me are awesome. The developer?s updates are unreliable and I highly recommend having a testing site or stay a couple of updates behind so that they can fix what they screwed up. Do not update Woocommerce unless WooZone has updated their plugin a couple of times. The support that the developers provide is a joke and a waste of your time. Watch the comments on their codecanyon site it will give you an indication of what issues they are having. Although do not bother leaving any negative comment because they will remove it. That really makes one wonder about their rating system.

Well that is my two cents. Good luck.

amzwoo said:

I use WooZone on 4 sites and agree that the prices can be all over the place. It was not like this with earlier versions. I am not sure if the issue is with WooZone or the way the Amazon Advertising API provides the information in buckets.

As for the cron jobs it does work although you need to set it up correctly. Follow WooZone's instructions and make sure you change your config file. Keep in mind that the cron job will only run if you your site is visited. You can get around this by using a cron service to trigger your cron job on a regular basis.

My experience with WooZone is a love hate situation. So far I have not found a better plugin for the price and the opportunities it provides me are awesome. The developer's updates are unreliable and I highly recommend having a testing site or stay a couple of updates behind so that they can fix what they screwed up. Do not update Woocommerce unless WooZone has updated their plugin a couple of times. The support that the developers provide is a joke and a waste of your time. Watch the comments on their codecanyon site it will give you an indication of what issues they are having. Although do not bother leaving any negative comment because they will remove it. That really makes one wonder about their rating system.

Well that is my two cents. Good luck.

Click to expand...

Hey, thanks for your reply and information.
Do you run eCommerce stores as well? Did you also bought the bundle like me and use Kingdom Theme for your sites?
Don't you think that it's bad for an Amazon Affiliate eCommerce store to have random prices that do not match Amazon's, I think people can get their affiliate accounts banned for this easily.

I already followed the instructions about the cronjob, edited the php file and such.
I agree about their support, I already have several tickets open at their site. I spent hours looking at the comments on CodeCanyon these days but little to no solutions were given, just the typical answer: please open a ticket on our support site.

I have all the latest versions updated (WooZoone, WooCommerce) but the problem was there before the updates.
Do you suggest I ask them for an older version of the plugin?

Has any of you tried out this plugin: WooAffiliates - Wordpress Plugin


its from the same producers of WooZone. I wonder what the difference is.

Cyberdemon87 said:

Hey, thanks for your reply and information.
Do you run eCommerce stores as well? Did you also bought the bundle like me and use Kingdom Theme for your sites?
Don't you think that it's bad for an Amazon Affiliate eCommerce store to have random prices that do not match Amazon's, I think people can get their affiliate accounts banned for this easily.

I already followed the instructions about the cronjob, edited the php file and such.
I agree about their support, I already have several tickets open at their site. I spent hours looking at the comments on CodeCanyon these days but little to no solutions were given, just the typical answer: please open a ticket on our support site.

I have all the latest versions updated (WooZoone, WooCommerce) but the problem was there before the updates.
Do you suggest I ask them for an older version of the plugin?

Click to expand...

I run niche eCommerce sites that promote mainly products from Amazon and to meet Amazon OP I sprinkle it with products from eBay. I am not really concerned about the price difference because it shows the last update date for each item.

When I purchased WooZone they did not have the bundle although I did buy the Kingdom Theme. In fact my first support ticket was about the theme and after that experience I went with different theme.

You can ask them for the past versions although if you are running the current version of WooCommerce that will not do you any good. The problem is that WooZone has not made the changes that WooCommerce require. When they release the next update that should resolve the issues (no guarantees). I don't know when that update will be coming but I image within the next 7 days.

Your best bet is to wait and when you have everything up and running correctly, do a backup. If new updates are released for WooCommerce and/or WooZone you want to wait until you can test them on a test site. I use the rule "if is not broken don't fix it". Of coarse if they come out with some awesome feature I will run it on my test site before updating my live sites.

I hope that helps. Good luck!

I remember comparing them but I don't recall why I went with Woozone. At this time 2-3-2016, if you are running WooCommerce Version 2.5.2, WooZone is not compatible. You will need to wait for WooZone to release an update with the fixes. I hope that helps. Good luck!

kweiss said:

Has any of you tried out this plugin: WooAffiliates - Wordpress Plugin


its from the same producers of WooZone. I wonder what the difference is.

Click to expand...

I remember comparing them but I don't recall why I went with Woozone. At this time 2-3-2016, if you are running WooCommerce Version 2.5.2, WooZone is not compatible. You will need to wait for WooZone to release an update with the fixes. I hope that helps. Good luck!

I also paid for WooZone and never used it yet...luckily.

Be careful with this plugin. Many people got banned because of it.

Thanks for the heads up, got my site running and still got some work to do, wouldnt be fun if i did all that and got banned. I wonder if they'll fix it ever. The support is a joke, I asked a basic question and she/he gave me an answer to something completly different.

I bought the WooZone bundle from them a few months ago, and have been having numerous problems as well. What's particularly frustrating is that CodeCanyon now implements a 6 month support policy on all their stuff, and after that time period you have to pay extra for future months of support. However, the developers of this plugin can take well over a month to get back to you. And when they do, it will often be something like "try downloading the latest copy of the plugin and installing it to see if that helps" or "the username and password you supplied isn't working" (when in fact it is). It's as if they are just stalling to provide you any real support, and merely responding back with something vague just to show that they responded, when they're not really helping much at all.

Thanks for catching that, regarding the pricing. I'm wondering though, if it may have something to do with the vendors adjusting their prices multiple times a day. In other words, if you have a cron job set to run once a day, and the vendors are changing their prices several times a day, it makes sense the prices would be incorrect. Also, WooZone runs rather slowly, so perhaps it hadn't yet gotten to the product you were comparing prices on? Just a thought.

For the past couple months, I was having numerous problems with the plugin + their Kingdom theme. For one, the product listings weren't displaying the additional images correctly. Then the tabs for the product details weren't working. Also, the product details weren't displaying either. Then more recently, the product images weren't showing up at all on the main Shop page. Their most recent update fixed most of these issues, for now, but waiting over a month and a half for this to get fixed was not cool. Not to mention I never seem to get notified by the plugins and the theme that there are updates available. The only times I find out about the updates are after I put in a support ticket, and one of their staff informs me to download the newer versions.

I still have yet to go live with the site I intended to use this on, because of all the bugs and issues over the past few months.

Well they have an update as of last night (you should be receiving emails from Envato Market - codecanyon). WooCommerce Version 2.5.2 is the latest and it is certainly not the greatest. I have tested this release on my test site and it still has import issues. My test site is set up with the latest WooCommerce plugin. Don't waste your time with this one. Good luck!

This is for anyone that is considering WooZone or any other products from the developers of WooZone. Do yourself a favor and find a different plugin. Even though I have sites that use this plugin I believe it is in my best interest to find a different plugin for my next site. The developers of WooZone are unreliable.

Hello.
I cannot download the update that was released last night because I have bought the bundle and not just WooZone, and they have not updated the bundle. I hope they do soon.

Anyway, lots of problem for my site too as the prices issue continues.
I opened a ticket asking why my products don't update to the latest price, ex. when something goes in or out of sale, and the answer was that it's because Amazon has 3 prices instead of two:
[TABLE="class: a-lineitem"]
[TR]
[TD="class: a-color-secondary a-size-base a-text-right a-nowrap, align: right"]List Price:
[/TD]
[TD="class: a-span12 a-color-secondary a-size-base a-text-strike"]$65.00 (crossed out)
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: a-color-secondary a-size-base a-text-right a-nowrap, align: right"]Price:[/TD]
[TD="class: a-span12 a-color-secondary a-size-base a-text-strike"]$39.99 (crossed out)
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: a-color-price a-size-base a-text-right a-nowrap, align: right"]Sale:
[/TD]
[TD="class: a-span12"]$26.99 (current correct price)
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
and that, that is a weird situation.

How is this helpful for me and my site, I dare not ask.

Now I feel really bad for paying $66 for all of this.


If my eCommerce site has outdated prices, Amazon can and will ban me, isn't that right?

What should I do, any advice is welcome.

Cyberdemon87 said:

Hello.
I cannot download the update that was released last night because I have bought the bundle and not just WooZone, and they have not updated the bundle. I hope they do soon.

Anyway, lots of problem for my site too as the prices issue continues.
I opened a ticket asking why my products don't update to the latest price, ex. when something goes in or out of sale, and the answer was that it's because Amazon has 3 prices instead of two:
[TABLE="class: a-lineitem"]
[TR]
[TD="class: a-color-secondary a-size-base a-text-right a-nowrap, align: right"]List Price:[/TD]
[TD="class: a-span12 a-color-secondary a-size-base a-text-strike"]$65.00 (crossed out)[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: a-color-secondary a-size-base a-text-right a-nowrap, align: right"]Price:[/TD]
[TD="class: a-span12 a-color-secondary a-size-base a-text-strike"]$39.99 (crossed out)[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: a-color-price a-size-base a-text-right a-nowrap, align: right"]Sale:[/TD]
[TD="class: a-span12"]$26.99 (current correct price)[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
and that, that is a weird situation.

How is this helpful for me and my site, I dare not ask.

Now I feel really bad for paying $66 for all of this.


If my eCommerce site has outdated prices, Amazon can and will ban me, isn't that right?

What should I do, any advice is welcome.

Click to expand...

First of all I am very sorry that you are experiencing these problems. With that said I will no longer bite my tongue when it comes to the developers of WooZone. I think the best advice anyone can give you is to find a different solution that is what I am currently doing.

I do have successful sites using WooZone although there is always issues when it comes to the developers updates and they are of no help when it come to their support.

If you continue with WooZone make sure you have backups of your site and do not update WooCommerce until you know the developers of WooZone have made the plugin compatible. The most important thing I can share is to test all updates on a test site first.

As for Amazon banning for outdated price I think if you are showing when the price was last updated (as of 02/02/2016, 10:00 AM) you are probably all right but that is just my opinion. Your best bet is to ask Amazon. I have never been outright banned by Amazon they have always contacted me and allowed me to make the necessary corrections. You get banned when you do not react and respond.

In regards to the prices being all over the place I believe that has to do with the way Amazon is providing the information. Well that is my two cents. I hope something from it is helpful. Good luck!

Hey.
Thanks for your input. I'm kinda of afraid to ask Amazon, from what I have read they can be total jerks when it comes to affiliates, and don't provide actual valuable direct answers to your questions, since when they ban you there is no way to find out what you got banned about. There's always the same answer: You broke our ToS, etc.

You never had any price issues with you sites yourself? Are you running eCommerce or review sites though?

First of all do not be afraid to ask Amazon. From my experience they are very helpful although sometimes it does take some extra effort to get a straight answer from them. If they don't give me a straight out No then I take that as it is okay for now. For the ToS I have broken they have always allowed me to make corrections. It is the affiliates that ignore the warnings that get banned. I run four niche eCommerce sites although they have eBay items and other advertising. Amazon does not want your eCommerce site to be a mini Amazon site. You should ask yourself why a potential buyer should come to your site over going directly to Amazon's site. Otherwise what value are you providing? Anyways that is my two cents and the only reason I started participating in this blog is to warn others about the issues with WooZone. Good luck!

I guess one reason the potential buyer should visit an eCommerce site is because of the selections and recommendations it has featured, rather than everything Amazon has all over the place, and also because of a blog section that has value to offer.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
I wouldn't know about eBay, I haven't gone that road.
I don't even know if it's against the ToS to have eBay/other along with Amazon products in your eCommerce store.

Anyway yes, the hot topic here is WooZone and the problems it's causing.