product feed question.

[Retail Creations]

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Hi Guys,

We're putting the final touches to our product feed system for both Natural Instinct and Gadget Storm and I need to get a consensus of opinion....

Products being in more than one category have always been a problem for product feeds and there's 3 ways I can think of to deal with them....

1) repeat the product once for each category
2) put a comma seperated list of all the categories a product is in in the "category" column
3) put up to 10 columns at the end of the feed and list all the categories a product is in in seperate columns

Now i'm all for going with number 1 because I think it's easier for eveyone (and it means that the affiliate can mirror our category set up really easily) but i'd like to know which of the 3 affiliates would prefer ?

[drivetowin]

Hi Jon

My preference would be option 3 - reason being that duplicate products in a feed are fine for categories but a real pain if someone searches for the product as they can end up getting the same product several times

[HeresJonny]

I'm with Keith on this one - I prefer the product NOT to be repeated. Option 3 gets my vote.

[Rich]

Option 2 is my choice.

Normally products and categories are stored separately and option 2 is the best representation of that. The data is exactly the same as Option 3, but I think throwing a lot of extra columns on the end of the record is just an ugly solution (IMO).

[morleymouse]

i go 2! but make sure there in some sort of order if you know what I mean.

so if its a toy, a gadget and a vibrator then the field looks like toy,gadget,vibrator for all items like that not some having toy,gadget,vibrator and others with gadget,vibrator,toy and another with toy,vibrator,gadget

sure you can see what I mean

[999gi]

2 for me too please

[ianm]

Either 2 or 3 makes no real difference to me, as long as the products aren't duplicated.

[watcher]

I'd say Option 1.

As long as you have the manufacturer code held against the product its easy enough to filter out when necessary.

[BigB]

I think repeated products are a real pain and Option 1 is the worst solution!

I'd go for Option 3.

[watcher]

I think option 2 & 3 are ugly solutions !

[Retail Creations]

Originally posted by watcher
I think option 2 & 3 are ugly solutions !

Does that mean that you think option 1 is a good solution or is there a 4th possibility ?

[watcher]

Option 2 implies records within records (unless I've misunderstood) and Option 3 is not generic - that is, you will allocate an arbitary number of categories and if that number increases in the future somtime the record structure will need to change in symapathy - so you will probably over allocate and be left with a lot of empty columns. Option 1 simply requires each product carries a unique code that never changes.

Having said that I appreciate there is an element of what people are used to, what systems they have in place and perhaps what they have been trained to do. Not sure if there is an absolutely correct answer - all 3 options will convey the information - and Option 1 appeals to me for the reasons above.

[ianm]

Option 2 does imply records within records, but it's very easy to handle with an explode command so that you get all the categories for that product.

There is an option 4 - distribute it relationally, but that means that the file could only be distributed as an excel file - 3 spreadsheets - products, catecories and products/category link.

Option 4 isn't really feasable so option 2 is the easiest to handle.

Option 1 means messing around having to dedupe records when you add them to your database, whilst still retaining the category information of all of them. As you say, option 3 limits the number of categories.

[Retail Creations]

Massive thankyou to everyone who has replied to this post, great feedback!

It's obvious from most of the comments that there is no consensus of opinion so we decided to give our affiliates the option of using any of the three formats above.

I've now put our new product feeds system online here....

http://www.retailcreations.co.uk/content



Also, can i say a massive thanks to Rich Danby who actually wrote a php script for me that converts the excel file to CSV, cheers rich, I owe you a beer or two at the next G2G