Expedia - New Feed Available!

[RebeccaRiches]

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buy.at is pleased to announce the launch of a new product feed for Expedia!:tup

The feed contains a vast amount of rich information about the hotels that Expedia offers including deep links to take your customer directly to the booking page for the selected hotel. This product feed contains all the location details for hotels including longitude and latitude for integration with web applications such as; MapQuest Platform and Google Maps API.

If you’re new to product feeds…

Product feeds give you the ability to access a merchant’s product catalogue and allow you to dynamically display their product information. Feeds are implemented on a huge array of sites from the world’s largest price comparison sites such as Pricerunner and Kelkoo through to smaller but highly effective niche sites.

It might be helpful to think of a data feed as an extension of a merchants own website. A good feed, when processed correctly by an affiliate, can result in highly-targeted web pages that advertise a merchant’s content to consumers that they would not have reached otherwise. Implementing a product feed requires a few simple lines of code whereas hand coding of thousands of individual product pages can take a considerable amount of time. The saved time allows you to focus on other areas of your site such as SEO, marketing and site design; further increasing your sales effectiveness.

You can download a feed from buy.at using one of two methods.

First of all you can use our Management Area. Head to the Content & Creative section of your MA (this section is called Make Links for non-UK based customers).

From here, you simply need to select the feed format from the dropdown box (ensuring you click Go when you’ve done this) and when the page has refreshed, click on Download next to the feed you wish to obtain and save the file into your required directory.

The second method which we will use in this example is to repeat the above steps but instead of left clicking on Download, Right Click on it and “Copy Shortcut”.

When you paste your link to a document or browser, your link should be in the form of:

http:// feeds.perfb.com/index.php/download?OEMAIL=user@domain.com&PX=662af1cd1976f09 a9f8cecc868ccc0a2&DISPLAYFORMAT=HEAD&PRODUCTDB_ID= 392

You can see various parameters in this URL such as the download format, compression method, connection type and feed ID. The feed ID is as follows:

Expedia: 392

You can now instigate the download from any location such as your desktop or from within a script – you do not have to be logged into your Management Area to do this.

We have available a step by step guide to downloading and using buy.at Product Feeds. If you would like a copy of this please let us know by emailing rebecca.riches@platform-a.com.

If you are not on the buy.at Expedia affiliate programme, please CLICK HERE to sign up.

We also have a dynamic feed coming very soon…watch this space for details! If you are interested in using this once it is launched, please send an email to rebecca.riches@platform-a.com to sign up.

Please get in touch if you have any questions or feedback on the feed!

Thanks
Bex

rebecca.riches@platform-a.com
Account Manager
Platform A's buy.at

[Librate]

Great news i have been waiting a long time for Expedia to catchup re: feeds- fantastic result getting this sorted Rebecca !

Thanks!!!

[Hayley Nolan]

Hi Librate

Let us know how you find the feed?

We also have some great new things coming from the Expedia programme in the next few weeks so we will keep you updated.

Many thanks

Hayley

[trevHCS]

Had a quick look at it last week and all the basics are there, but it seemed the only links were to a booking page and there's nothing to a kindof "more info" page - essentially what they'd land on first if searching Expedia.

Also could do with more than 1 pic to help sell them, plus it's pretty much impossible to nick them from Expedia since they're all Flash.

Oh and any way the feed can be split or filtered so for example we can get only UK? Just with the large number of entries makes the files quite big.

Finally - don't suppose they're thinking of an XML availability feed?

Trev

[SimonQuick]

Had a quick look at it last week and all the basics are there, but it seemed the only links were to a booking page and there's nothing to a kindof "more info" page - essentially what they'd land on first if searching Expedia.

Also could do with more than 1 pic to help sell them, plus it's pretty much impossible to nick them from Expedia since they're all Flash.

Oh and any way the feed can be split or filtered so for example we can get only UK? Just with the large number of entries makes the files quite big.

Finally - don't suppose they're thinking of an XML availability feed?

Trev

Hi Trev,

We'll speak to Expedia regarding the links and additional images and see what we can do.

For the filters, I've made a small change to both the Expedia and Hotels.com feeds so you can filter by country. These will be in place ASAP.

All you need to do is add the following parameter to your download URL:

&LEVEL2=<country>

so for example,

https://feeds.perfb.com/index.php/download/feed?OEMAIL=username@domain.com&PX=password&DISPLA YFORMAT=XMLGZIP&REVERSEMAPXML=yes&CONNECTION=&PROD UCTDB_ID=289&MAPPED_CAT_ID=392 &LEVEL2=UK

would download only hotels on the UK.

You can run this on multiple countries by slightly amending the parameter.

&LEVEL2[]=UK&LEVEL2[]=US

will download UK and US hotels.

This will also work on the LEVEL1 field which contains the city names.

Its probably worth reading this forum post i put up a couple of months ago on the subject

http://www.affiliates4u.com/forums/b...ownloader.html

Any questions, feel free to get in touch

Regards
Simon

[SimonQuick]

The new columns are in place now - country code is now under Level2