How to make smart profitable, deal, affiliate and comparison site on Woocommerce

Today, I will show you how to create smart profitable affiliate site on Woocommerce with help of Rehub theme and Content Egg plugin. If you don’t have this theme, you will want to have, because, it’s most powerful theme to get profit from woocommerce websites. 

The most basic settings

When you install theme, you will see a very basic site which looks far away from what you need and demo pages, but don’t afraid, setup is simple.

First of all, install our bundled plugins. You will need Visual Composer (for creating custom pages), Content Egg and woocommerce. First two plugins can be enabled from page Rehub – Plugins. Woocommerce is free plugin, you can install it from Plugins – Add new and type “woocommerce”

Theme options (Header, colors, footer)

Next thing – go to theme option and set Logo. Important thing – under logo you will see fields where you need to set size. This is for retina logo script. You can find your logo size when you upload it in media

Also, it’s good to have better mobile header, so, go to Theme option – mobile and enable mobile compact header and upload logo for mobiles (must be more compact). Make sure that compact logo looks good on menu’s background color.

Then go to Theme option – header and menu and choose header layout. There are many other options on this page and you can configure header in many ways. In most cases, I use for affiliate websites Header Layout “Shop/Comparison” or “Logo + menu in one row“. But it’s up to you. Don’t forget to change option “color style” to Dark style and white fonts if you change background color of menu to dark colors. Also, if you choose any header with search in header, choose to show “products” in search options (theme option – header and menu options – search options)

After this, go to Theme option – appearance and set colors for system elements, buttons, etc and change text in footer line in Theme option – footer.

All other options are optional. Maybe you want to change shop layout in Theme option – shop settings, I recommend to choose grid layout. if your site is totally affiliate and you don’t need cart on site, you can also disable Cart scripts in theme option – shop settings – Enable/Disable. Some other options will be described in this article.

Widgets

All widgets are available on page Appearance – Widgets. There are several ready widget areas in theme and many custom widgets. You will see that there are Sidebar widget area (this is used in posts, pages, archives). Woocommerce shop pages have own widget areas. We added Woocommerce shop sidebar (used in archives and shop categories) and Woocommerce Product Sidebar (used on inner pages of woocommerce products).

Usually, I set Product search filters for Shop sidebar and Product widget for Product sidebar. Other good widgets which you can use are Better categories, Top offer widget, Deal of Day widget

For footer – I usually use simple text widgets to add some info about site, also, Rehub Social icons. Also, you can add mailchimp form and divide footer in two columns

You can also read about some interesting widgets in docs

Adding Products

After basic setup, I recommend you to add some products and posts on site before creating homepages, menus and other.

First of all, think about structure of products. What is your niche? What categories do you want to have? I don’t recommend you to make too much categories. AVOID to create tons of categories and tags, this will slow down site and hurt seo of site. I see the same error on many sites, they have too much categories and these categories have only 1-2 products. Choose some basic categories of site, if you have some products and don’t know category of such products, add them to category “Other”.

Sources of offers for price comparison

Second. Mostly, all comparison websites are affiliate websites. What does it mean? It’s when you have partner deeplinks on your site. Visitors click on links from your site and go to original site with product where they can buy product. Link will have special affiliate ID part (deeplink). If user opens original site with such link, and buy something, you will get commission. You can get deeplink from affiliate network (network which gather many shops) or directly with affiliate program of shop (if they have it). So, most important step is decide what way you will use to get offer data. There are several basic ways:

1. API of networks. For this, you need to use Content Egg which has many module APIs.
2. Direct Web parsing. For this, you can use Affiliate Egg which has some ready parsers.
3. XML feeds of products, which you can get in your affiliate network account.
4. Adding products and prices manually
5. Other

We don’t require special way, theme can work with any  ways. All ways described in docs

We also support some additional plugins like Woozone, WooAffiliate, Price Comparison PRO, Datafeedr. Do you know any interesting plugins? Suggest it in comments.

In this article I will show you mostly how to use Content Egg PRO and Affiliate Egg PRO, because they are most powerful and can do also price trackers, specification parsing, price history, videos, image galleries and many other good things. Theme buyers gets Content Egg Light version, you can use it for start, it has Amazon, CJ, Offer (manual), Coupon (manual), Youtube and many other modules. Theme buyer’s can get coupon to get PRO versions with discount. You can also use Light version with combination of Affiliate Egg PRO, xml import and any all other plugins.

Don’t forget, that, by default, woocommerce is for creating store with products which users can buy on your site. But our theme has many affiliate functions, so, it will automatically detect your external products and disable “add to cart button”. Anyway, it will be better to make all your affiliate products as External in woocommerce

Adding price comparison with Content Egg – recommended

So, let’s start. First of all, go to Content Egg – settings – Post Types and enable Product, then go to Content Egg – settings – WooCommerce synchronization and enable there modules which you need for price synchronization. If your product will have Content Egg offers, plugin automatically detect lowest price product and will make it as Main offer. Overall price of product will be updated with price update of this offer. Also, when you add any offer to product, you can choose it manually as main offer. Read more about Woo synchronization

Also, in settings of each module, you can enable saving featured image (image of product). Also, each module has own set of different options. Most important option – is price update. Read about price update of Content Egg

Now, create new product, add keyword for search in Content Egg panel

After searching, choose best offers which will be in price comparison. Add content (but you can keep it empty if you want). Better to have seo optimized content. Check our tutorial for seo optimization In content, you can use also our content formating shortcodes, like colored boxes, heading, auto contents, higlights and many others. Check our shortcode generator

Product Layout

After adding offers and content, you must choose Product Layout. We create several special Product layouts for Price comparison and Content Egg. Once you choose them, theme will get all data from plugin and create good looking page. You can use it even without content and it will still look pretty good. Theme will get also images from synchronized module, video (use youtube module), specification and common price list. Theme will delete default woocommerce button and will add Best Offer button

Best deal part will show Main Offer of product. You can also change text on buttons in Theme option – Localization. If you want to change other strings – use Localization of theme

Product Layout can be selected globally in Theme option – shop settings – product Layout or per each product.

Autosections Product Layout have several hard codded areas and it’s created special for Content Egg modules, so, mostly you don’t need to add any other shortcodes to product. If you want to have full control of all tabs, content parts – use any other product layout with common shortcodes of Content Egg. You can find all common shortcodes in this part of panel. For better compatibility, I recommend to use shortcodes with [user] in name, because they are created special for theme

Choose shortcode, copy it in left field near select and place in content or in Custom Product Areas

I will show you some examples.

This is Extended Full width Layout, I added also common shortcode List widget with store logos to custom area near button. Also, I changed Button name to Best Price. See Demo 

Next example

This is Sidebar with sections product Layout. Good thing is that it has Sticky header and sticky sidebar. Looks great. I do the same things as in previous. See demo

You can find other examples on the same demo site. All of them are different product layouts. I used Common shortcodes: widgets – for custom area and Lists for content areas of products. There are a huge amount of combinations which are available, you can use common shortcodes and module shortcodes to show content from separate modules, you can divide them, combine and use in any parts of site. Read more about shortcodes in docs of plugin

Custom woocommerce tabs

If you check some product layouts in demo site, you will see that I added comparison lists and price history in separate tab of product or separate section. How to do this?

Really easy, follow our guidelines how to add Custom Product tabs

It allows to create separate and global tabs. In tabs, you can add any content, including shortcodes from Content Egg. So, you can create, for example, Tab “price history”  and add there Common shortcode “Price history” from Content Egg Plugin.

Using Combination with Affiliate Egg PRO

Affiliate Egg PRO is for web parsing of sites. This has some advantages and negative sides. But good thing is that you can use Affiliate Egg integration with Content Egg to have advantages of both ways (API and web parsing), this will open new additional functions for such combinations, for example, you can parse also reviews and plugin will automatically convert them as woocommerce reviews (check this option in each module of Affiliate Egg integration).

Another good thing is that you can use bundled Content Egg Light with Affiliate Egg PRO.

And last thing is that some parsers of Affiliate Egg can also parse specifications.

Read more about Affiliate Egg integration

Using XML feeds

Another way to add product price comparison is using xml feeds from affiliate networks. I am not fan of this way. There is one reason of this. It’s because affiliate networks create such feeds and provide them for all users. This means that you can’t combine different modules, like in Content Egg to make unique content and combinations. Also, there are many other people (and usually people prefer to use feeds than API) who use the same feed in the same way as you can do. Anyway, in our theme we are trying to make all things more unique and customizable, so, we added some new ways to use feeds for price comparisons which are not available in other themes.

For instructions, check how to use Bulk Import of xml feeds

Adding external Coupons and Printable Coupons

Coupons can really confuse you because Woocommerce plugin also has coupon function. Let me explain. Coupons inside woocommerce core is coupon system for your inner products. Means that you can create coupon and user will get discount for purchase something directly on your site. Theme also has option to add coupon for external purchase.

You can add just coupon, hidden coupon, and even printable coupon (enable printable script in theme option – shop setting for this)

Other ways

You can also use any custom plugin which works with woocommerce affiliate products. For example, Woozone is good if you want to make bulk import from Amazon (but you will have not unique site in this case). Price comparison PRO plugin can be used if you want to add manual offers with price update for local shops (you can also use Offer module of Content Egg for this). Be aware of one worst thing in any bulk import plugins. They can import tons of attributes and make your site really slow. Check settings of your plugin and disable auto generating of attributes

Fill extension and plugin combinations

One good thing in Content Egg is that you can extend your products which you added early with other plugins. For this, you need Fill extension.

This extension can add data to all existed products from Content Egg modules. Example: you have 100 products which you made with other plugin. Now, you want to add also some videos to each product. Go to Content Egg and enable Youtube module. Go to Fill extension and Add data for module Youtube. Choose Keyword source as Post title if all your products have product name in title. Plugin will check all titles, will use post title as keyword, search relevant videos on youtube and will add videos to product. You can set how many videos to add for each product in settings of Youtube module (Results for autoblogging field).

There is also such option – Add Keyword for the automatic update. If you enable it, plugin will add keyword for product update (not the same as price update). So, plugin will overwrite list of videos in each product update.

The same thing you can do also for offers and other modules. For example, you added products with plugin Woozone from Amazon, but you want also to extend them and add some offers with Content Egg. Use Fill extension for this and assign additional offers. The only possible problem here is that all process is automatic, so, you can control relevance and results can be not as expected. Sometimes, it’s better to use EAN code for keyword base. So, you can import EAN inside SKU field of woocommerce, then in Fill extension choose

EAN search is supported in next modules Affilinet Products, Amazon, Tradedoubler Products, Impactradius

Once you will have assigned offers, you can add common shortcode to product content or inside custom tab to show these offers in all products. Check previous steps how to create custom product tabs. You can create global custom tab and place there common shortcode from Content Egg. For example, you can name it as “Additional Offers”.

Also, you can add offer grid in end of each product, after Related product section. For this, go to Theme option – Shop options – Before footer. Add there next code

<div class="flowhidden" id="cegg-custom-section-woo-area">
<div class="rh-container mt30 mb30">
[content-egg-block template=custom/all_offers_grid]
</div></div>

This is good way to add more relevant offers to existing site and get more money.

Adding Custom code for Products

Our theme has several Custom Product areas, which can be used to generate custom code or global code. You can use Html or shortcodes from your custom plugins. You can add some beautiful icon block, highlight some attributes or add special link to connected post review.  We also created several Examples with good blocks. Check here

How to add Accessories, variations or Used Product tab

You can get even more profit if you add some additional offers to best products. There are two ways to do this: with shortcode parameters of Content Egg and with Hidden products. Shortcode parameters is more quick and Content Egg product layouts will show tabs automatically, but it’s limited in further editing. Anyway, I describe both ways

Shortcode Grouping of Content Egg

This allows you to have next cool tabs

To add them, use new feature from Content Egg “Groups”. For this, when you choose your offers in CE panel, add new groups

Then, you can assign each offer to group. So, you can search, for example, “Iphone White color”, assign it to your group, like this

Then, search for Iphone Black color, assign to new group, etc. This way is better for variations. But, it’s not good way when you need to add Accessories or anything which have another price. So, you need to use “Hidden” products for such tabs.

Hidden product for accessories

For example, you create product Mavic Drone. But when you search it in modules, you will find that there are many additional offers, like different bundles, separate parts for drone, lens filters, refurbished and used drones. You can add separate tab or section in your product to show this content. Create new product and make it as Hidden in woocommerce and change date of publishing (make it in far past). Then, in your main Product, you can create custom tab or just use shortcode in product content.

You can click on shortcode generator in product content and choose Post/Product Offer scorebox shortcodes. Start typing name of hidden product, select it and then, choose one of available shortcode types and get final shortcode with product ID. Now, you can use this shortcode in any part of product, in content, in custom areas and with custom tab as I described above. Or you can use any of Content Egg shortcodes, just add post_id parameter to shortcode to import offers from other product.

Price drop widget

Another cool new thing in Content Egg – is price drop widget and blocks which will show most big price drops in your offers per period. Read about Price drop widgets

Specification and attribute creating and parsing

Woocommerce attributes – basic information

Specifications are the most hardest part of site. Of course, it’s not required, but you can add many additional good thing for your site which makes it look as real professional top site. And one of such thing is specifications.

All specifications for woocommerce are based on woocommerce attributes Very important to understand that there are two types of attributes: global and local. Global attributes must be created in Products – Attributes. They can be used for advanced product filtering, in product comparison, in creating advanced snippets, etc. Local attributes can be added inside each product. They are just like text blocks or additional content and can’t be used in any advanced functions.

You must understand which attributes you want to have as global and which are local. Also, think about global attributes as like categories. For example, your products can be red, yellow, white colors and you want to have such search filters on site – make them as global attributes.

In latest version of Content Egg, you can use attribute parsing, which can save a lot of your time.

When, you search by any keyword, you will see next thing

This means that plugin found some attributes for offer which can be imported on your site. Click on blue icon and you will see all available attributes. You can also delete some attributes, change names and values. I recommend to check several products and check which attributes you can import. I strongly recommend to use attributes from the same module in all products.

First of all, when you check attributes from several products, you will see that some attributes can be very long, some short. It’s time to decide which of them can be used for global and which for local

As you see, global attributes must have short (better numeric) value and only one per attribute. Local attributes usually very long, can have many values. By default, plugin will try to autodetect attributes and divide them automatically. But not always this will have 100% best results, so, you can control this.

If you want to replace value with your custom value, for example, instead of word “yes”, you may want to show tick image. or instead word “red”, you may want to show red color circle, you can do this with our Swatch Feature

What if standard attributes are not enough?

Woocommerce attributes have some limitations. For example, they are not comfortable when you want to add custom numeric value and each product has own value. So, it will be too hard to add each value as global attribute. So, you can use Custom fields.

To add custom fields to Product, you can use default wordpress Custom field panel or you can use free plugin for meta panels ACF (or any other). Using plugins are more easy as you will have custom panel in Product. But also you can add fields without any plugins

Check right corner of admin panel of product and enable there Custom fields.

Now, you have custom field panel where you can add custom data. So, add custom field, for example, demo_link and add value. It can be numeric or text.

Next time when you add custom field, you dont need to click on “Add new”, you can select field key in select

Parsing attributes and specifications with Content Egg

Go to Content Egg – Settings – General and change some options

Attributes synchronization – will import attributes of your synchronized offer. This means that you don’t need to choose offer which will be used to import attributes.  Plugin will import attributes from synchronized offer. But, not always synchronized Main offer can have the best attributes. In most cases, you can find best attributes in offer which is not best priced. You can even enable some modules which can be used only for attribute parsing, so, I recommend to disable this option (enable it if you need to parse attributes for autoblog).

Global attributes filter – here you can choose how to control Global attributes. You can keep it as default, so, plugin will autodetect. You can also choose whitelist and blacklist. I recommend to use whitelist in most cases. You can add attribute names in field below for whitelist

How to know best whitelist? As I wrote, you should check some products and see which attributes you can parse

You will see that one of your module has good attributes for most of keywords. So, check whole list and decide which attributes are best for global and set their names in whitelist. Only whitelisted names will be global after import, all other will be local.

Sometimes, you will find that you can search some offers which have best attribute list, but you don’t want to include this offer in product price comparison list. No problem, just use this offer for attribute import, save product, then delete this offer. After importing, product attributes will be still in product even if you delete offer which was used for attribute import. Also, you can always change attribute in product if something went wrong.

Homepage design

We have more than 20 ready homepage design and near 20 different ready blocks. Most important part of Homepage is first screen. If you check most popular affiliate websites, you will find that they are using three type of first screen: Slider or big banner, Product loop or Big Area with search, Category grid. For all of these types you must use page builder. Check docs and video for some tips with page builder

Anyway, for all types of homepage, first of all, go to Settings – Reading and choose page which will be used as Homepage. Then, you can import Homepage from page builder

Epic Sliders and Hero images

We start to add ready Blocks for Revolution slider. Plugin is bundled with theme, you can download it from Rehub – Plugins.

We prepare some ready sliders for you. You can download on our page

Top search Block

We prepare several variants of top search blocks.

Check demo 1 demo 2  demo 3

All of them are available in ready templates for Page builder (Elements: Top search block). Don’t forget to change background image to own and change post type on product post type inside options of Search module

Simple product Loop

If you want to have just simple product loop in top screen, use one of woocommerce modules in page builder. Don’t forget to change settings for best match (you will need to change columns number, number of products to show, pagination, etc

Check tutorial how to use Page builder

Category or section grid

This is example of how it can look. You can add any link in sections. To add such section, use Banner Grid ready template from Page builder. Another good module to add on pages is Category box module from page builder

Advanced settings of shop pages

Basic Product Loop Layouts

I will give you some secrets to make product loops even more interesting inside your shop pages.

First of all, you have choice to choose product design in shop pages. To change them, go to Theme option – shop settings – Set design of woo archive 

Also, you can choose how to show default shop page (as 3 columns, 4 columns, with sidebar or without). If you choose any shop layout with sidebar, you can also add widgets to Shop sidebar in Appearance – Widgets (Woocommerce shop sidebar area)

Also, you can extend your design and add some important info inside each product.

Featured attribute area in products

Re:hub theme has some powerful functions for Attribute system of woocommerce, which pushes it on next level. We added additional text tag, image, color tag types of attributes for product swatches. We added product swatches to filters, comparison charts and specifications. But you can go even further and add featured attributes in top of Product Page and in product Loop.

Examples

You can build any type of attribute section or specification via Page builder. Here is video how to use specification

Settings for wishlist and Dynamic Comparison

We added very powerful wishlist and comparison functions directly in theme, so, you don’t need any plugins now.

Check how wishlist work and dynamic comparison

Also, if you use Shop/Comparison Header layout and enabled comparison icon, you need to disable the same icon from right side of site. Do this in Theme option – Disable button in right side

Settings for Product Search filters

Please, read docs about some ways to add Product Search Filters

Conversion helpers – top pages, versus pages, top lists and tables

If you want to have maximum profit from your site, I recommend you to make Top conversion pages and promote them on your site (you can add links to them in Sidebar with help of Rehub:Better menu or you can add links  in main menu)

Investigate some helpers from theme in this section of docs

Adding separate section with reviews and news

One of good way to increase conversion and quality of your site is creating Reviews on site. You can add Editor’s review directly to Product.

You can also create separate Post or Blog Post with reviews and assign review block in product which will point to Post Review. To create review, use our Review functions Then, in review, you can also connect review to woocommerce product  To connect Product to review, like this

add shortcode to Custom Product Code Area

[wpsm_reviewbox id=77 compact=1]

where 77 is ID of post where you have review.

CrossLink Blocks

To improve cross linking on your site, you can add many variants in your custom tabs, like Links on Popular Products (by month, day, year), Links on Attribute archives, Top pages, connected news and reviews. Read about CrossLink Blocks

How to improve speed

Well, woocommerce is slower than simple posts, so, you must enable cache on site. But, please, don’t do one mistake. Don’t enable any cache until you finish all other settings of site. This article will help you to enable caching

Video tutorial how to make price comparison website

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