BANS vs phpBay - International Traffic

I’ve used both BANS and phpBay for my niche affiliate websites for a quite a while and I’ve experienced ups and downs of both scripts. Both scripts are excellent money makers, no doubt on that. I know that because both made money for me.

Because BANS and phpBay basically work similar to each other, I want to spend some time over the next few weeks to compare the two eBay affiliate scripts. In this post, I want to compare how both scripts deal with international traffic to your site.

Both BANS and phpBay were designed to work with international eBay sites. But the main difference is that BANS doesn’t have the capability to provide the international auction listings by Geo-targeting automatically. What I mean by this is that if you want to display Canadian auctions listings for Canadian visitors, you will have to build a separate BANS website just for that traffic.

With phpBay, you can build one affiliate website and make it display the international auction listings to the particular international traffic. In other words, if someone from United Kingdom visits your phpBay website, it automatically matches the Geo-IP and displays the auctions listings from eBay.co.uk instead of eBay.com.

This is a true advantage of phpBay over BANS. This translates more revenue from your eBay affiliate website. But in order to use this feature, you have to go through some steps describe on Brewsterware’s “Optimising your ebay affiliate profits” post.

Now, it took me a while to make it work right because the instruction was somewhat vague. The download file provided on that post didn’t work for me. Instead, when I used the default geo.php that came with phpBay, it worked. So use the downloaded file for country.php but use geo.php that comes with phpBay. Also, they should be placed inside “includes” folder. I don’t think that was mentioned in the post. If you have problems getting it to work, just let me know. I will help you setup correctly.