Products Removed From Feeds, Why?

[Affility]

I have a utility to add products from various feeds to my DB. The utility has a feature to regularly check whether a product in my DB has been removed from the feed - I obviously don't want my links going to a page saying "Sorry, the product cannot be found".

However, I've found that 60% of the links to these products (removed from feeds) still work and the product can still be purchased. Anyone know why this would be?

[lowndsy]

It's price tapestry or something very similar innit? I get that a lot - it misses out a lot of lines, seemingly at random, but I think it is down to dodgy characters in the feed or malformed fields, and it's a problem shared by most xml / csv parsers.

Some networks feeds tend to be worse than others for it. I won't say the worse network because they sent me disgusted and indignant emails last time I mentioned them and I'm fed up with it. Besides, that's the least of their problems.
I'd say Awin feeds are the least affected for me, but that's academic - they all get hammered by it sometimes.

Unfortunately it is a massive job for networks to clean and validate feeds - taking a lot of time, processing power and manual intervention, so none of them do it properly yet.

[Markup]

Originally Posted by lowndsy Some networks feeds tend to be worse than others for it...

Are they the best sellers by any chance ( you you may find after a little invesigation that they are) 's usually a good indication that they are selling well. List them and resubmit them through your db by way of custom deeplinks if necessary, if you are promoting them via ppc and can come up with more relevant content han the merchant it's an aid to you rather than a hindrance.

If a feed follows the genreal specs it takes 2 mins to rework/categorise...

[Affility]

Originally Posted by lowndsy It's price tapestry or something very similar innit? I get that a lot - it misses out a lot of lines, seemingly at random, but I think it is down to dodgy characters in the feed or malformed fields, and it's a problem shared by most xml / csv parsers.

It's my own windows app and I don't think it's down to dodgy characters as they do appear in the product feed in the first instance. It's more likely that the merchant has left out the product for some unknown reason. Just wondered what that reason was.

Thanks Markup, I'll keep a look out to see if they are best sellers.