affiliate feed middleware

[pricethat]

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It will not be possible to make a script that generates new product descriptions on the fly as it were simply because a computer needs a set list of commands and it doesnt know anything about the products, there is more we can do with the description for example adding a tag at the beggining with the product name repeated. something like this:

Product name xxxx

product name xxxx description: bla bla bla bla bla bla widgets bla bla bla

The only real productive benefit of that is that it will add what i would think are the real keywords for that item again into the description to raise the keyword density up a bit.

But apart from that the only other way is to manually make them each time, this would have to be done manually to make sure the descriptions were correctly SEO'd as it were.

Any other suggestions people?

[anonymous]

hello,

it's certainly an interesting idea and i'm sure it would be very useful, but isn't that something the networks should do? If they just sorted out and standardised the feeds across merchants that would be useful.

We have also got loads of scripts which kind of do the same things as you are suggesting... don't have an image resizing one yet thought. How do you propose to resize the images?

[999gi]

I had thought of doing this a while back but decided against it because of the bandwidth costs of serving feeds to affiliates

My plan was to solicit payment from merchants and networks to have their feeds quality checked and send them fix reports as I couldnt see affiliates paying much for it despite it being useful.

I was also going to publish league tables of feed quality with % bad links, % broken images type stuff

I think it'd be great if you can do it and wish you luck

[lowndsy]

Image resizing isn't too hard with gdlib or image magic or similar, or if anybody needs it I've got a nice snippet that analyzes each image in an array and resizes them to be all the same width or height.

[pricethat]

Of course it is something that the networks should of course be doing and i am sure that they are, however its a good thing to offer something completely independent to what the networks offer.

In answer to bandwidth issues, the script would collect the images, resize them using the GD library and host them on the server. Any costs to the merchant for bandwidth will be saved again because any images lookup wont be on the merchants site so if anything i can see them saving money if anything. In theory if one affiliate wanted thumb nails smaller than another the server could just reprocess its existing files it collected that day to suit the affiliates needs.

The main purpose of this is indeed the reports, a report showing that a merchants feed is only 50% is an indicator of how good the merchants scheme is anyway. Most merchants populate the feeds directly from their store database anyway, if there is errors with there store data then its less conversions for us.

The result, with public data available is that it would push merchants into correcting their problems, especially if they had access to the reports that told them what was wrong.

The biggest thing of this is if affiliates and networks would actually use the tool. My costings for this are no profit, but we still need to cover bandwidth, my thoughts were that affiliates would only pay for the cost of bandwidth used in performing the import, and delivery of the feed.

If a decent server allowance was say 300 dollars a month for 2000GB per month then this would work out at very little. A huge feed of say 100,000 products would cost the affiliate less than 50 cents, or 30 pence to processs. Probably much less.

As well as giving the affiliate the choice upon processing if he wants images handled as well we could get that cost down to next to 10-20 pence per go. Considering the amount of cost in time it would take to repair a feed manually, and also the the correct feed that they get after which would have to result in more sales or at least better conversion rates i think this is negligable but perhaps you can tell me any different?

Regards to all