Product Feeds & Affiliate Networks

[Qui Gon Jinn]

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Does anyone think that affiliate networks have had enough years to develop high quality product feeds / api solutions for affiliates to utilise. It just seems that are a majority are still more focused on banners.

What with Dealtime, Kelkoo, Pricerunner, Buy Cental gradually making these available to a wider selection of affiliates. Will this now begin to hurt the pockets of the networks who have failed to deliver or have feeds which are problematic? Perhaps some of the networks should have had a white lable solution by now.

I realise one or two networks may still be developing an decent API solution, but we can only tell when this is launched.

[pricethat]

Well i always argued this point, if it takes us years to overcome all the bugs/potential bugs, all the learning about structures and all the rest and try to make a living in the process then it would of taken a network much less time with commercial investment behind it.

We make our money 100% from the data feed links themselves without banners so how "some" networks can maintain that they dont make money from them so dont invest in that side of it is beyond me....

I think the problem is not the api, it is the fact that you can deliver data on a silver plate and it will still be the same crap data that you get from the merchants to begin with. I dont think any network have invested enough in bridging the gap between providing data and providing marketing data or at least sufficient enough quality/content to allow us to get started in the first place.

Perhaps to smaller affiliates the api's etc are nice but from my point of view it makes no difference whether have api or data dump, the only thing that does matter to me is the quality of the information inside them which i think is more important and probably what they should be concentrating on more than saying they have an api just to show off and appear all corporate when they are not.

One network released a "developers toolkit", makes me laugh really considering no one serious is going to develop any meaningful application from it, whereas thousands more affiliates would make thousands more sales if the data was right in the old methods.