Play.com Product Feeds

[Cheapdvds]

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many thanks Pete , feed is working much better (and quicker ) now

cheers

[albo]

Hi Pete,

While we're at it, is there any reason why Play.com do not include laptops in your product feeds?

Hi Nick,
Sorry for the delay with this, I know you have been waiting some time for the laptops to be added to the product feed.
The new Play.com product feed will be ready in four weeks and will include the laptops.

[Cheapdvds]

ok , think im being stupid , im trying to ddownload the 3 feeds below , have used the direct download links as i have a cron job setup to do this , also have added the end bit to the links so only DVDs are downloaded.
The first time i downloaded these (manually) was find , tesco and DVD.co.uk feeds about 25meg each and the HMV feed about 40 meg, now when i do this via my cron job other stuff as well as DVDs are downloaded and the feed sizes increase (HMV 180meg , DVD 100+ meg and tesco 75 meg)

can anyone confirm if these download links are correct? and anyone have any ideas what im doing wrong

sorry to be a pain but im struggling to get my head round what im actually doing wrong

thanks in advance

HMV.xml feed = https://users.buy.at/menu/productfee...188&LEVEL1=DVD

Tesco.csv feed = https://users.buy.at/menu/productfee...PED_CAT_ID1=22

Dvd.csv feed = https://users.buy.at/menu/productfee...PED_CAT_ID1=22

[Pete Cheyne]

Hi Cheapdvds,

Can you contact me direct via the email address below and ill help you further.

Cheers.

[Cheapdvds]

cheers pete , email sent last night

[criscokid]

What is the correct syntax for downloading the Play.com feeds in their specific groupings - e.g Film, Gifts etc?

I didn't know this was possible (selecting what categories you want to download) - a GREAT reason to join programs on the Buy.at network where a programme is on multiple networks. Are there any other networks that offer this cool feature?

Is the John Lewis feed on buy.at also sub-categorised like this? Is there a list of what feeds on Buy.at are sub-categories and what those categories are?

On Play.com (electronics) the product descriptions include formatting such as paragraph breaks and bold. Is there any way to get this formatting in the feeds? (Tradedoublker have the option to include or exclude formatting).

[Pete Cheyne]

Hi criscokid,

All of our feeds are internally mapped to our own standardised category structure. If you want to make use of this, here is a list of all our top level categories, with their associated MAPPED_CAT_ID1:

20 Baby
41 Bags & Belts
42 Blu-Ray
23 Books
8 Boys' Fashion
36 Cameras and Photography
26 Clothing & Fashion
27 Collectors Items
37 Communications
3 Computers
22 DVDs
4 Electronics
28 Event Tickets
18 Food & Drinks
17 Gifts
7 Girls' Fashion
11 Health & Beauty
12 Home & Garden
13 Household Appliances
29 Internet & TV
30 Jewellery
6 Men's Fashion
31 Mobile Phones
15 Money & Bills
2 Motoring
24 Music
21 Office Products
14 Phones, Internet & TV
19 Special Offers
10 Sports Equipment
9 Toys & Games
16 Travel & Holidays
38 TV and Video
40 Video Game Consoles
39 Video Games
25 Videos
5 Women's Fashion


As for the product descriptions, some merchants include HTML formatting and some are just plain text. If you want to automatically remove HTML tags, you can try using the handy strip_tags function in PHP.

Hope this helps

[criscokid]

I've noticed that the Play.com movies feed on TD contains more information like director, DVD region, release date. Is there any chance of getting this extra info included in the Buy.at feed?

[Pete Cheyne]

Ok thanks for letting me know. We can certianly request this information from them.

Cheers

[criscokid]

Ok thanks for letting me know. We can certianly request this information from them.

Any news on this yet?

I've had a look at a few of the feeds on Buy.at and noticed a few problems / things that could be fixed / imrproved:
ASDA Electricals: No product descriptions or even promo text.
Laskys: The description text is set to 'title case' (the first letter in every word is capitalised).
Play.com Gadgets and Digital Direct: the product descriptions on the website are way better and more descriptive than what they've got in their product feed.

Some of the feeds (like Digital Direct) only have the model number in the product name field meaning you've got to concatnate the brand name, model number and product type together to have a useable product name. Other feeds (like Laskys) just have the brand name ALL IN CAPITALS and model number in the product name field which means you somehow need to modify the brand name so that it's in Title Case - not easy to do automatically when you've got brands like TDK or JVC.

[Pete Cheyne]

Thanks for this criscokid. I will pass this on to the relevant people and we will try to work with the merchant's to get these issues resolved.

I have not heard back from Play yet, but i will let you know as soon as i do.

Cheers

[criscokid]

I'm really impressed by Pete's 'can do attitude'. This together the merchant taking on board these comments at the end of the day will result in more publishers choosing Buy.at over other networks and the merchants are likely to enjoy increased sales.

As a publisher the less time I have to spend on cleaning / modifying feeds to make them suitable for my sites means I have more time to add unique content / promote my sites which in turn will hopefully lead to increased sales.

Another thing I'd like to see aded to all feeds is an EAN - some feeds have them, some don't.

[Pete Cheyne]

Thanks Criscokid, we are in an ongoing process of updating the feeds to include more standardised information such as the EAN, ISBN, Brand Name etc where appropriate.

I'll let you know of any changes/updates.

Cheers