Build A Niche Store Wordpress Plugin WP BANS Review

I received an email from Casey Christensen who owns Designs by Casey. He wanted me to test and review his new Wordpress BANS plugin and give a review of it. The plugin is called WP BANS and can be found at http://www.wpbans.com. I gladly accepted being a beta tester and am grateful for the opportunity to review it.

The plugin simply put, pulls a designated amount product listings from your Build A Niche Store and inserts them into the bottom of your Wordpress blog post or page. It can ad products using keywords from your post title, top category or a custom field. The colors of the background and border can be changed as well.

THINGS YOU NEED BEFORE INSTALLING

You will need Wordpress installed on the root of the domain and BANS installed in a folder preferably named store. While not a must, it is a good idea to have a Wordpress/BANS template in place as to have a matching seamless template throughout the site. It appears it will work with both using different templates though.

THE INSTALL

I downloaded and unzipped the plugin to my hard drive and first noticed there was not a README or directions file enclosed. I am sure it was because this was a beta package and am sure it will be included in the purchased product. Dealing with tons of plugins in the past, I had a pretty good idea what to do. The plugin folder gets uploaded into the Wordpress plugins directory as with any plugin. You then log into your Wordpress admin and activate the plugin. Click Settings and then WPBANS in the menu bar. It nicely told me that WPBANS cannot find your store. You need to edit the BANS store location in the WPBANS Settings. I then inserted /store into the path area and was on my way. The "Get keyword from" option is a bit confusing and will need more clarification as I myself have never really used the Custom Field option of Wordpress and clarity on that would help. The other options are pretty straight forward and are very user friendly from my standpoint. On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the easiest, I rate the install process an 8 and can easily be upgraded to a 10 with a detailed README file.


THE USAGE

I proceeded to write my first post and chose to use the title of the post to base my product selection on. Once I get a better handle on the custom field, that will likely be my selection in future use. Upon viewing my post I found what may be a bug. It did indeed pull matching products, but the product display runs into the title of the next post and also seems to have inserted an extra table row above the product listings. The listings seem to overlap the post area as well in the template I am using. The products indeed matched what I was wanting to show. This indeed is likely just a cosmetic bug and should be simple to fix. On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being fantastic, I rate the initial usage process a 6 and it can easily be upgraded to a 10 with a fix of the bugs and clarification I noted.


OVERALL

The plugin definitely has a bug or two but should be rectified very easily. It seems it will be very user friendly and seems to work with both EPN and Pepperjam versions of the BANS software. It is very straight forward and can be up an running in a post in a matter of minutes. My overall initial rating from 1-10 with 10 being the best is a 7 and it is only a days work from being a 10.

SUGGESTIONS

It would be nice in future releases to have the ability to decide which post you want to display products in. I suppose using the "wpbans Custom Field" it would be possible to just leave it blank and no products would show. It would also be nice if the whole product title could be displayed under the listing as well. I would suggest giving an option to not cloak the links as I am not a huge fan of cloaking myself and every user should have that option not to cloak. A very detailed README file should be included as well.

FINAL THOUGHTS

This plugin is a hit, especially for those BANS users that have moved on into BANS/Wordpress integrations . You can never have too many weapons to choose from in the affiliate marketing world. $67.00 is a fair price to pay in my honest opinion and this plugin will likely evolve very quickly. It is straight forward and beneficial to every BANS user. I appreciate Casey letting me review and beta test this fine Wordpress plugin and look forward to more works of his in the future.

The site I tested this on is below:
http://passionduo.buildanichestoretemplates.info/

Below is a preview video of the plugin:

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