Auction Thumbs was designed for a different purpose. It is usually used to display a single row of thumbnails in the post footer or column of thumbnails in the sidebar as a complement to your blog content.

I designed it to accompany quality blog posts and be relevant to the content but not be too in-your-face with the shopping aspect. 65% of my traffic on my main blog is from search, so the site visitors clicked from the SERPS based on my content being exactly what they’re looking for. They read quality content and see products related to it in the footer and sidebar. Your *new* site visitors are your best affiliate customers – they’re in shopping mode, actively searching via the engines. Why not show them related products when they land in your content?

PHPbay can be used within a blog, too, but I wanted a solution that didn’t make my blog look too much like I’m forcing shopping on the readers. There is no text accompanying the thumbnails unless the user mouses over the image. This makes it conservative on real estate and reduces blog clutter.

I also designed it for two types of site admins:

1) The blog admin who wants to set it up and forget it – put it on autopilot by having Auction Thumbs chose Ebay items for a particular post based on your post tags.

2) The blog admin who wants to tune the relevancy of the thumbnails at the post level with powerful search criteria control.

Both are possible with Auction Thumbs and can be done on a post-by-post basis. One approach is to set it on automatic for the bulk of your site, but fine-tune the posts where your heaviest traffic lands.

Hope that helps.
John