Installing Piggybank Plugin for WordPress

The installation of Piggybank is an absolute breeze, and is exactly similar to almost all other WordPress plugins that you may have installed previously.

Unzip the piggybank.zip file that you have received.

FTP upload the /piggybank folder (created by the unzip procedure) into your /wp-content/plugins folder for your WordPress site.

You will end up with a /wp-content/plugins/piggybank folder that contains piggybank.php and a few small .png image files.

Now, log in to your WordPress administration panel, and proceed to the “Plugins” screen. In the list you will see the new “Piggybank EPN Report” plugin that you have just uploaded.

Click on the small link to activate the plugin.

Thats it !! You are done.

Configuring the Piggybank Plugin

Click on the “Piggybank” link in your WordPress administration panel. This will take you to the “Piggybank Configuration” screen.

Enter your EPN account login and password, EXACTLY as you would enter it if you were logging in at eBay Partner Network site. Piggybank needs your login/password so that it can log into EPN and download your stats information for display.

Enter the currency of your EPN account. It does not really matter what you enter here, as it has no bearing on whether Piggybank works or not. All we use this for is to display on your reports. If your account is in US Dollars then you could enter $, or US$, for example.

Enter in the date range for which you want to see your stats. Make sure it is in the american mm/dd/yy format, otherwise Piggybank will generate an error.

Now, if your website is physically HOSTED on a GoDaddy server then you must answer YES to the next question. This has nothing to do whether your domain name is registered with them. It purely has to do with the actual HOSTING of your website. GoDaddy handles HTTPS (secure web connections) differently to any other host, so Piggybank has to take special action in this case.

The next question has to do whether you wish to display a “clickable” image of the auction next to each completed auction or ACRU. This is a nice feature if you wish to quickly see what you have sold without actually going to the auction. BUT, it will make the report page load very slow if you have a LOT of sold items. So use this with care. If you say NO to this, then you are still given a “clickable” link next to every completed auction (and ACRU) so you can still click directly to the appropriate auction to view it.

The final 2 fields have to do with your server settings. Piggybank processes a HUGE amount of data for you, and by default it will attempt to allocate 32M of your servers RAM to its operation. However, if you put in a date range that has thousands of completed sales (and ACRU’s), then Piggybank may need more than the 32M. If your report generates a memory error (or just does not display) then try increasing this field in 16M chunks .. ie. from 32M to 48M to 64M, etc.

Also, the larger the number of sales and ACRU’s you have, the longer it takes for Piggybank to process. Your servers default timeout value for a script to complete is 30 seconds. Piggybank attempts to increase this to 60 seconds by default, and if your report still does not display on a HUGE dataset then you can increase this as well. The suggested minimum is 60.

You can always look at the very bottom of a completed report screen and it will tell you how much time and memory was needed, and you can extrapolate from that for larger datasets.

Lastly, click the “Save” button to save your settings.

See this tutorial on Using Piggybank plugin for WordPress