Products

ASA2 Products Section

Overview

The Products section (formerly known as “Repo”) is the place where you can store and organize your affiliate products in ASA2. Starting with the selection of the shop, you can enter the various product properties here or have them automatically synchronized using an affiliate API, such as the Amazon PA API.

Technically, the section is based on WordPress’s Custom Post Types, so the products data is stored in the WordPress database like any other post data. This allows you to organize products within categories and tags, and to store your own product reviews as post text. Using this information, ASA2 makes it very easy to create dynamic product lists.

Unique Features

  • Organize your products in form of WordPress custom posts

  • Build dynamic queries based on the product properties with Smart Collections (see [asa2_smart_collection])

  • Automatically refresh and preload the product data via affiliate APIs such as the Amazon PA API and ASA2’s cronjobs (see Product Update Cronjob)

  • Get notified via email about the properties of your products like availability (see Notifications)

Create Products

ASA2 Products Shop Bar

How to create products with ASA2 differs depending on whether they are to be created via Amazon PA API or for another store.

Further information

Screencast



PA API flowchart

ASA 2 Repo diagram

Whenever ASA2 tries to load a product, it checks if it exists in the Products section (formerly known as “Repo”). If it does, it loads the product data from the Products section making a request to the Amazon API unnecessary.

ASA 2 Repo

Usage

By default, ASA2 is configured to put an Amazon PA API product into the Products section automatically when it gets used for the first time, e.g. when you save a post containing ASA2 Shortcodes or a collection gets loaded for the first time. This behaviour can be adjusted to your wishes in the Products.

But you can also fill the Products section in advance by manually adding new products or importing a bunch through the URL importer.

Read more about Create an Amazon Product

Refreshing the products

If a product is outdated, it will be refreshed automatically, at worst when a user requests a page.
Using the cronjob Product Update Cronjob, all products can be refreshed without user action on your server, e.g. at night. Together with the configurable lifetime of the products, the Products section offers you all the flexibility you need, to prevent realtime Amazon API calls on user page access.

Therefore the Products section greatly improves page load speed even if you do not use any of ASA2’s Caching options.

Read more about Product Refresh.

Advanced

As the Products section is based on Custom Post Types, you benefit from all the familiar WordPress features. You can use categories and tags on your products and load them dynamically with the shortcode [asa2_smart_collection]. You can insert a text or excerpt on a product and use it with the template placeholders {{ repo_content }} and {{ repo_excerpt }}. For more details about the available products placeholders, check placeholder section Products.

Read more in Products Advanced.

Learn more about Products section in the subchapters: