i thought it was time to say thank you

**pricethat** · 18-05-05

I just wanted to take the time to say thankyou to all those merchants that really take the time to make their marketing partners lives lovely. I would like to thank BT for spamming their product descriptions with banners in their datafeed and bright red stars telling the world how great they are. I would liek to thank tribal for providing a data feed with most of if not all of the images missing and replaced with the most ugly of images just to ensure that people click on one of my links to leave my pages.

I would like to thank buy.at for making me have to merge deeplinks with my tracking id just to use the feed, as well as to Zanox for making sure that the datafeeds are so hidden that my competition cant get hold of them.

Of course im so proud that you have all come to see my little message today and i sure dont have enough time to thank everyone so i will finish by thanking comission junction for charging $200.00 to use their feeds, we really loved the way they wanted to look after our money for us.

Sadly, like with anything theres always the bad apples as well, the likes of affiliate window, tradedoubler and more for not giving me any grief at all, we hate these guys for being helpful, accurate, fast and polite, in a time of disorganised chaos, tracking errors and lack of service we feel that these companies have let us down by going against the grain.

Come play guys, remembering to give thanks where due

**eskimo** · 18-05-05

Post of the day!

**David Bowley** · 19-05-05

Yea, give everyone the acknowledgement they deserve

**Malcolm Cowley** · 19-05-05

Hi

" I would like to thank buy.at for making me have to merge deeplinks with my tracking id just to use the feed "

Im a little lost on this statement so would you be able to clarify it for me please . As far as I am aware our feeds our already deeplinked for you to avoid the situation I think your mentioning.

If thats not your experience then of course I would like to be aware of it as the last thing I want is any unsatisfied affiliates - as you will be aware as a forum member we are one of the most affiliate centric networks in the UK and hopefully we can get to the bottom of this and move into the second half of your thread of thanks

Mal

**angelabx** · 19-05-05

Originally Posted by pricethat

..... thanking comission junction for charging $200.00 to use their feeds, we really loved the way they wanted to look after our money for us.

Do they really.

I've signed up for feeds and didn't know this???!!

**Fraser** · 19-05-05

With CJ I think it's $200 or free if you have made $10,000 sales in one month.

**angelabx** · 19-05-05

Originally Posted by Fraser

With CJ I think it's $200 or free if you have made $10,000 sales in one month.

That explains why I'm free then

**pricethat** · 20-05-05

I guess they didnt like the fact we did ten grand with tradedoubler instead

**pricethat** · 22-05-05

Thought i was entirely unfair to leave out internetcamerasdirect for their expert and thoughtful use of this little lot.

<img src="http://www.internetcamerasdirect.co.uk/images/wdc-best-buy.gif"> "Recommended!" Which Digital Camera FREE <a href=http://www.internetcamerasdirect.co.uk/pro-pix-batteries-case-accessory.htm

Im so glad to be dealing with people like these, they save me all the effort of having to make sure links are in place, they do it for me bz stuffing their own links directly in their data feed.........................

**Fraser** · 23-05-05

Is it not reasonably simple to use strip_tags in php to remove this kind of thing if you don't want it?

**pricethat** · 23-05-05

Im sure there is a way though its unreasonably uncomplicated, i think i made a post not so long ago but if for example i have a million product records and then i apply something like 14 different rules to the import process (ok the rules may be picky but we are looking at an ideal world, images, descriptions, no html etc) then after the import process i am lucky to get around 250,000 products.

Im fine with that as i work with it all the time and can make my own scripts to get round it, thus making my data a little* unique.

Putting html in descriptions either shows a complete lack of knowledge about what they are doing, or is a purposeful spam. I dread to think how many affiliates have html in their page results that will result in not getting paid any commissions.

Of course i think it means we got to go back to removing listings with html tags in them, but it would of been easier for all concerned if the offending tags were not there to begin with.

**Fraser** · 23-05-05

We maybe need to be a little more understanding about where the merchant is coming from and their point of view. Any merchant offering a data feed (of any quality) is already doing more for their affiliates than a whole lot of other merchants.

I can see why merchants would put this kind of stuff in the description of the products and I think it's unlikely to be a calculated attempt to get some free links from affiliates.

I'm not saying it's not a problem ( I have the same issues) but just trying to approach it in a more positive way that is likely to see improvements made. Have you contacted all the merchants concerned to explain the problems and what they could do to help you earn more? Have you contacted Mal to discuss the buy.at feeds?

I'm not getting at you just noticing recently that many forum posts are a bit too negative.

**matbennett** · 23-05-05

When we first produced a datafeed for affiliates, I was completely unaware that it (originally) contained HTML. It seemed that, at some point in the past, someone had gone through cross-linking products by way of an upsell. These ended up in the feeds completely innocently.

As soon as someone pointed them out they were removed from the feed in a pretty rough & ready fashion. Since then I have coded a cross-linking module for the shop to replace this so that similar things cannot happen in the future.

I can imagine what a PITA things like this are - but do bear in mind that many merchants wouldn't even know to remove these (there was certainly not any mention of problems like this in the Awin spec - which was my first contact with product feeds). Also the person who looks after product descriptions may not understand Affiliate Marketing or may even think that this helps!

My, rather biased, advice would be to switch to a merchant who doesn't do this!

**holmes** · 23-05-05

I reported the Internet Camcorders Direct feed to Affiliate Window back in July last year and received the response below, i used strip tags on it in the end but it amazes me its still there, not only are affilates losing out but so are Affiliate Window?

Affiliate Window said: 19 Jul 2004 17:46
David,

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I will contact the merchant and ask them to make changes to their feed.

Regards,
Steve