I'm a total stats junkie and I like to be able to keep an eye on my stats wherever I am. If I'm out and about, I want to know how much commission I'm earning because it might well influence my spending decisions. If I'm buying lunch in Tesco, a good day's figures might mean me heading for the Finest range. No sales means I'm looking at the Value options. By the way, have you noticed that you can get nearly everything as Finest now, including broadband! And the other stores have their own equivalents. I knew things were getting out of hand when even the bleach in Sainsburys was "Taste The Difference".

Anyway, back to the post... I've been logging into Buy.at from my mobile phone for a while. It works OK but the whole logging in thing is always a hassle using the small buttons on a phone.

I was aware for sometime that Buy.at offer Web Services to access your statistics but hadn't got around to looking at them. A few days ago I decided I wanted a simple text only page I could quickly access from my phone handset to find out where my commission was at any given point. So I set aside an afternoon, got a tea on the go and readied myself for a few hours development.

Except I didn't need to. I clicked on the Web Services tab and all the work was already done for me - a selection of pre-formed links with my username and password embedded that return the stats in a variety of formats to suit whatever you want them for e.g. XML, CSV or plain text. So I grabbed the link for plain text results, added it to my phone's bookmarks and now have one touch access to my stats wherever I am. My planned afternoon of development was done in 5 minutes. Thanks Buy.at - very nice feature.

Labels: buy.at, web services