Annoying feeds!

[NetNeo]

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Is it just me or are the excellent idea of product feeds just a waste of time.
The principle is excelent, the end result in poor to be polite.
I have just been experimenting with feeds from some of the networks, and all fail to meet expectations (except the excellent new POR feature!).

If you're a merchant, and use feeds please read the following and take note:

The feed is there for US to sell YOUR items so,
1.fill all the details in...u only have to do it once per added item, and you can have hundreds of affiliates selling it more effectively. That means filling that one item in properly makes you item list properly on YOUR affiliates sites who are trying to sell YOUR product!
2.if you stop stocking an item...remove it from the feed...having a customer built up to buy something just to click through to find "product not found" doesnt build consumer confidence in our sites or yours!

Now on to the networks:
TD:why oh why do your feeds use different separators between CSV data...its either a "|" or its a ";" so make your mind up and make it consistant. If this is down to something I am doing (using your defaults) then you need to make it "work out the box".
AF:why cant we have a proper CSV feed instead of you insisting you have to FTP it to us? Not everyone can have an FTP server running!
CJ:Havent got to you yet so I will let you off!
POR:Thank heavens someone can get it right! Your new feature, although a little confusing to find your way around at first, is a top notch idea...other networks take note! To coin a Peter Kay phrase "I've seen it, its the future"

Anyone who uses feeds and can help me a little way into using them (to allow for their downfalls) please let me know.

[Rich]

The reason for the |'s and ;'s in TD's feed is because the main fields are seperated by | and then the last field contain merchant specific feilds seperated by : and ;. Personally I think this is a good way to supply fields that are unique to the merchant while keeping the main file the same between merchnats.

The real problem with TD is they don't escape "s correctly so, if a field begins or ends with a " it confuses every csv parser I've tried it with. You can get round it by searching and replacing |"" to |" etc before importing.

AF and POR I haven't used seriously yet, though I did thought AF had added in the option to download single feeds a few months ago.
I'm not willing to pay CJ to make them money.
Buy.at feeds have been good.
Awin were the first with a good feed system, but they seemed to forget about it soon afterwards. Nothing seems to be done about merchants with html or links in their descriptions.

[NetNeo]

i'm going to hot foot over to buy.at and try these on that recommendation...theres light at the end of the tunnel!
As for the TD...now explained it kinda makes sense, but there should be an "standard" feed and then an option to include the extras if needed surely?
Have breifly looked at AWins feed but not used properly yet, html is not too bad to parse out so no major problem, but as you say, can be a right pain and AWin should make sure they are dropped to be effect enough to use.

I just feel a little dispondant with the feeds yet an see the great benifit to me as an affiliate to use them.

Possibly its because not enough use them that they get over looked in the first place and are allowed to become outdated and unusable

[drivetowin]

Welcome to the murky world of affiliate product feeds - where sane men fear to tread!!

The new POR feeds are first class - Clarke I owe you one there - I know I kept bleating about how long they took to arrive but the system is worth the wait

You only need an FTP account for AF and not an FTP server, you must have an FTP account otherwise how do you upload your website to the server - whatever, you can also simply download the feeds by clicking on the actual merchant name in the list of feeds but this will always be a version 1 feed, version 2 feeds are only available via FTP.

As Rich says unless you are doing $10K sales or more a month with CJ then you'll need to pay them $200 to access their product feeds - that said the feeds are good

Buyat feeds are good

AW feeds are the granddaddy of UK product feeds, they have a very usable format but as Rich has already said some of the data can be a bit dirty.

If you can its well worth learning how to process XML - its a damn site easier than working with CSV files as you dont have to worry so much about dodgy characters in the data.

Now if only Affiliate Future would provide XML feeds ........

[dave21]

Well said kbudden.

I'm new to all this, but not without any experience. Being a java web application developer, I'm used to dealing with these types of files (although in a different context) and I have to say that I find it amazing that all product feeds aren't available in XML format - CSV just isn't capable of properly dealing with the data that needs to be processed, unless all punctuation is exchanged for HTML character entities so as to not confuse the delimiters.

Right now I use AW and haven't really ventured on to other providers yet. I've looked in to TD and I'll have to start earning before I even think about CJ. Glad this subject came up though as I will deal with the friendlier networks before I bog myself down with the trickier ones.

AW look like they are on the right lines with their feeds, although the information could be better (but I suppose that is due to the merchant). I really love the fact that each merchant has their own feed url so you can automatically download the data, in whatever form, without the requirement of user intervention (i.e. logging in). However, I worry about the fact that these url's contain my username and password - surely a unique id would be better so that people can't intercept the http request and log in to my account?

I can't understand why some networks appear to overcomplicate things. From my point of view, I'd be over the moon if every network offered an XML feed per merchant that my computer could download and process when ever it liked - preferably while I'm not in attendance (i.e. through a URL). After all, isn't that what web services were made for?

Should every network conform to the same CSV and XML standard though? I think not, as it doesn't allow for the flexibility needed for progress and initiative. And it keep us on our toes.

Dave.

PS. Exciting news... ...Made My first commission last week! 2 sales worth £3.73, although yesterday, 1 sale was declined so I'm down to £2.73 now. So if any of your profits start to take a dive, you know what's happening!!!

[drivetowin]

Dave21

Congrats on your first commission - now next milestone is your first commission payment popping into your bank account

Oh I remember those days

[NetNeo]

AAARRRRGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!! this is so annoying..two days on ...different network and now I have a merchant who has insisted in littering description with html code and links to thier site!!!!!!!!
Anyone got a gun I could borrow?

[ukyellowpage]

I personally think that there should be a standard for feed, i.e. no matter where you get the feed - AW, AF, CJ, TD, and whosoever - they should appear in the same format - same seperator, same columns, bla bla bla........

Maybe the affiliate marketing industry should do something on this?

[gareth]

I personally think that there should be a standard for feed

The subject of standardised feeds keeps coming up, however I think it would be difficult to get the different networks to agree something between themselves.

Maybe what we should do is define in these forums what we consider to be the "perfect" feed (maybe two formats: CSV and XML), and then it would be up to the networks and merchants to aspire to get their feeds in that format.

I think until affiliates say "we want the feed like this, or we won't use it", there is no real motication for the networks and merchants to change what they currently have.

Just my 2 cents...

[NetNeo]

i agree...maybe we should start this together and see what we come up with!

Already having a bit of a back and forth with a merchat in this thread

[gareth]

Ok, here goes...

I'll start by cheating by showing you this fashion feed that was suggested by Jess in this thread (in excel format)

This feed has fields that are specific to clothing, so I guess straight away we're into the realm of having slightly different formats for different types of products...

I guess one of the key issues is that the Product Description field shouldn't have any HTML tags (or commas, etc). Maybe this is where we need to have an XML format in which the merchant can provide a fully description which does include HTML...

[NetNeo]

you gotta watch with ther HTML though you you start getting merchants puttin ghtier own urls in the description (by passing the cookie drop!)..i hae already had a merchants csv doing this

[gareth]

We need to have a defined subset of HTML tags that are used in the descriptions.
E.g. just formatting tags (bold, italic, underline, break, lists, etc) so that the merchant can layout extra information well (e.g. product specs), but not allow extra links, etc which may screw up the tracking.

In our software it would be very easy to restrict the HTML tags that the merchant can use, and I'm sure that would be the case for most ecommerce systems/datafeed generators.

[uksports]

NetNeo

From the merchants point of view, standardised feeds would also be great as we also have to raise data for the different feed formats and that can be very time consuming.

It's also interesting to view the freshness/removal of items question from this side - my biggest objection to feeds are that there are sites out there that are carrying products that we stopped selling 12/14 months ago! This creates a poor situation from both the affiliate and merchant point of view as it only creates customer resentment - however, when spotted, we contact the affiliate pointing this out and frequently get no response or , regretably on occasion, a very rude reply, and end up suspending the affiliate.

It is getting to the point where we are now on the verge of restricting data feeds to proven, pre-approved sites only, which is a shame as it should be a win/win tool all round.

So, as it should be, the professionals amongst us are all looking for the same result - it's those who are less than professional that are causing the problems

-- Chris

[matbennett]

It's also interesting to view the freshness/removal of items question from this side - my biggest objection to feeds are that there are sites out there that are carrying products that we stopped selling 12/14 months ago!

This is one of the downsides of making feeds easy to use - people are more likely to use them in a half-baked way. Out of date feeds are a real issue for us as well and have caused us problems with customers complaining that we are advertising false prices (when they were in fact prices for a special offer that expired almost a year earlier!).

This really shouldn't be a problem - as long as the merchants are aware of what sites are using their feeds (not always easy information to come by).