Introducing Datafeed Studio - new affiliate tool

[mwd2000]

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I'm pleased to announce a new affiliate tool named Datafeed Studio.

This web application converts merchant datafeeds into affiliate web sites. It can create niche online stores, price compare sites, or killer standalone single product price compare pages (great for PPC campaigns).

Please check out the site for more details, including an online demo, example sites created with this tool, plus a trial version you can download now.

If you have any questions feel free to ask them in this thread, or contact support@datafeedstudio.com for more details.

I'm hoping to grow this product to meet the ever-changing needs of affiliate marketeers so any feedback / feature suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Martin

[Markup]

Hiya

The price is the price - you say that it will parse the feed from AWIN, BA and TD as it comes.

Are you saying that for every other network it will be an additional 50 pounds to custom parse the feed?

[mwd2000]

Hiya

The price is the price - you say that it will parse the feed from AWIN, BA and TD as it comes.

Are you saying that for every other network it will be an additional 50 pounds to custom parse the feed?

No - sorry for the confusion.

Out of the box it supports AWIN, BA and TD, and you are free to create your own parser for any CSV feed from within the application - you just have to tell it what columns in your feed map to the internal Datafeed Studio database.

The £50 charge is for users who don't understand how to do the mapping for their format and as an additional service would like me to create a custom parser for their installation (it is quite tedious work).

Let me know if you require any further information. If there's a groundswell of support for a particular feed / network I'll add it into the core application as a default.

Regards,

Martin

[Markup]

Cheers Martin - all clear.

[Vialli]

Has anybody purchased this script and got any examples of sites they have bulit with this.

[markwelch]

> Has anybody purchased this script and got any examples of sites they have bulit with this. <

I bought Datafeed Studio on Monday (79GBP), and paid Martin to install it (100GBP) and create a ShareASale parser (50GBP), for a total expense of 229GBP (US$465), plus the cost of a new VPS account to use for testing ($10 per month).

It's definitely a 1.x release, and I've been pounding Martin with suggestions for changes. I'm going to need to spend a lot of time figuring out how to adapt it to my needs.

So far, I've been pleasantly impressed with the performance. To test Datafeed Studio, I opened a new $10-per-month VPS account with eApps (just 160MB memory allocated). Even after importing 52 datafeeds totalling 1.25 million records, search speeds are still quite tolerable.

I haven't done anything to customize or modify Datafeed Studio yet, but you're welcome to take a look at my current test site at "merchant dash product dot com" if you'd like. Note that you'll see different versions of the site if you include or omit the www prefix (with the www you'll see a price-comparison site, and without it you'll see a store front).

Disclaimer: I expect my "merchant-product" test site to change constantly as I continue with my testing. If you're reading this post after June 2008, it's entirely possible that the site might not even be using Datafeed Studio any longer!

[markwelch]

Since my last post here, I've abandoned, then re-tried Datafeed Studio, and now I'm abandoning it again. Although it may be fine for some uses, it lacks features and functionality that I need. (I've written about this more extensively on another message board.) I'm now working to create a more complex in-house solution.

FYI, over the past few weeks, I had continued limited testing using Datafeed Studio while my own developer works on my new project. In in the past week, I've experienced a wide range of erratic problems with data that DS appears to import, but which subsequently is not actually found in the database. At one point, all products disappeared from the database; more often, DS appears to import all datafeeds properly but some merchants' products aren't actually in the database.

Several times, I've searched for products that I knew should be in the database, but they didn't appear; I checked the DS admin interface, which reported that the merchant's datafeed had been imported without any problem; but in fact none of the merchant's products were stored in the database. If I manually re-import that merchant's datafeed, the products are stored in the database (and appear in search results right now).

Sometimes DS seems to inflate or shrink the reported database size without any clear reason (one day this week, I reloaded the page three times, and DS told me that there were 1.8 million product records the first time, 2.2 million a moment later, and 700,000 a moment after that). Searches that work one day return zero results the next day, even if I haven't done anything to modify the database (no edits or imports).

I don't know what may be causing this: it could be flaws in Datafeed Studio (possibly "scalability issues" due to the large database size, and/or a bug with the "import all" functionality), or potentially configuration problems with MySQL, or perhaps issues with the eApps Virtual Private Server (VPS) or its configutation, or potentially an external cause such as a random attack targetting my configuration.

I'm now completely ending all testing with Datafeed Studio, because I cannot draw any meaningful results from any data I gather from recent testing, since I can't know what data (if any) is being shown to visitors who conduct searches.

[kylah16]

Why don't you try Affiliate Marketing Price Comparison Websites | AffiliStore. It's free to use as well so you've got nothing to lose.

[markwelch]

I had briefly looked at the AffiliStore site several months ago (it's one of many tools I examined; there's a nice list of various tools at Affiliate Product Data Feeds Resources, Affiliate Network Services Documentations, Guides and Articles).

The AffiliStore script looks quite restrictive and limited in capability, and the sample stores are very fixed (and ugly) in appearance and layout. I can find no hint that it would provide any of the functionality I require, and it seems quite clear that it has much less functionality than Datafeed Studio (unless it has "hidden" capabilities not mentioned on the main web site, blog, or demo sites).

In addition, the AffiliStore site contains no information about who produces the script (no individual or company name, no address, no email address, no telephone number, etc.), and WHOIS records for various domains associated with AffiliStore are quite inconsistent. Eventually, I found multiple references to "Steve Balfour" who appears to be the author of the software, and whose primary business appears to be SEO consulting. (I'm not sure if Mr. Balfour is the same person as "lizdav" who moderates the AffiliStore forum.)

And yes, I do have something to lose: my time. I've spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars; I'm not going to waste any time chasing after a dubious-looking script product that appears to have substantially less capability than the products which I've already determined are not adequate for my needs.

[kylah16]

Ok fine I was only trying to help! There's no need to be so harsh about Affilistore, it has created a regular income for a lot of people including myself.

[markwelch]

I'm sorry for being a bit harsh; I think that your "nothing to lose" comment is what ticked me off, because I've spent a lot of time over the past 60-90 days talking to folks who have wasted so much of my time even though they clearly knew (or should have known, since they claimed to have read my specifications) that their solutions could not meet my needs.

You've never seen my specs or requirements (I've discussed them in much more depth on another discussion forum, and in a lengthy PDF document that I've provided to vendors), so it wasn't fair for me to react this harshly to you.

On reflection, it does appear entirely possible that Datafeed Studio was originally written to emulate or expand upon the concepts of AffiliStore, PriceTapestry, or some other common 'idea source,' as these products share some key concepts. Although I haven't seen any reason to download and try AffiliStore or PriceTapestry (as neither appears to meet my needs), they both appear to be a couple of steps behind Datafeed Studio in terms of functionality, probably because they were released earlier. (Once a 'feature set' has been locked in, it's hard to modify an engine like this to encompass new concepts.)

[John Jupp]

There's nothing wrong with your specs Mark. Just most designers don't want to be tied to a 6 month set down contract hourly rated which is what you initially proposed.

I use freelancers. Some of them have done script work for major clients including Singapore Telecom on my behalf. They turned you down because a) they have plenty of work from me and others and b) by concentrating on one project for up to 6 months, they lose potential clients.

That's why I had to decline what you wanted.

[markwelch]

John: This is a discussion thread about Datafeed Studio, and I've sought to share my experience with that product.