Troubleshooting your shops

1. Remove "Rakuten PopShops affiliate stores" link at the bottom?

That link is on the free plan only. No paid plans have the link. As soon as you upgrade, the link will go away.

2. Why do I see inactive products in shop?

A product (in ShopBuilder) can have several reasons for appearing "inactive". Rakuten PopShops can only work with the feeds supplied to us by the merchants - it would be against our terms to pull products in that have not been explicitly given to us to process for the affiliate channel. Here are a couple reasons you might be seeing inactive products.

• The product has been intentionally removed from the merchant's data feed. This is the most common reason for a product appearing inactive. It may be out of season or just not something the merchant wants to push through the affiliate channel.
• The merchant may no longer be active in Rakuten PopShops - this is a less common scenario.
• There may be a problem with the feed on the merchant's side and many products may have been dropped. Sometimes this will resolve itself.
• The merchant may have changed the unique ID associated with the product. This means that you may have to manually search for the product again.

The product may be marked as "backordered" or "out of stock" in the data feed. If you click your link and it goes to the correct landing page, you may always just keep the product link up and it will continue to work. Be sure and check it, however, to make sure it doesn't go to a "not found" or "out of stock" page.

3. Link problems

Is a link on your shop not working correctly? Please refer to link troubleshooting.

4. Use multiple affiliate IDs

Yes, you can use multiple affiliate IDs if you are Enterprise plan or above. To do so, create a "profile" of affiliate IDs from the Settings tab in your Rakuten PopShops account. You can then select which profiles to use from the "Pop it in" tab in ShopBuilder.

5. Sub IDs (affiliate tracking)

You can use affiliate-defined sub-ID tracking to help you manage your sales. Each network gives this "sub ID" tracking a different name, but in a nutshell it appends the text (or code) that you want to the URL. You can then run reports at the network level for that sub-ID. Here are examples of the various labels given by networks to this type of tracking:

• CJ: SID
• LinkShare: Signature Orders
• Google Affiliate Network: Publisher Member ID
• ShareaSale: afftrack

With ShopBuilder you can either use the Preferences tab or add a line of code to your "Pop it in" code for a dynamic Sub-ID (Data Pack plans and above for dynamic sub-IDs).

• Static sub-IDs: In ShopBuilder, go to the preferences tab over the product layout thumbnails and click on "Tracking with Sub Accounts" tab. Then you can replace the default (popshops) with any phrase or code you choose.
• Dynamic sub-IDs: If you are a Data Pack (or above) subscriber, you can add dynamic sub-IDs to a ShopBuilder shop. To add a dynamic ID to your shop, do the following:
  • Add an additional parameter to the code snippet that you copied from the "Pop it In" tab.
  • $psps_parameters .= "&psps_subid=MYCUSTOMSUBID";
  • In other words you just add a psps_subid parameter set to whatever you want the final sub-ID value to be.

6. Autofeed pagination not working

This issue typically occurs when two or more Autofeed snippets are used on the same webpage. For Autofeed pagination to work please utilize only one Autofeed snippet on your webpage. If pagination is still not working then please use broader keywords for Autofeed.