Product Feeds - Advice to Merchants

[lakrasia]

Hi,
I'm really making a lot of use of your product feeds now - thanks - really pleased to have access to so much info.

However, I am finding it a problem that merchants all seem to use it differently. Just a couple of suggestions:

The image links - they're all different shapes and sizes - if, for example, merchants all provided square ones, then at least we could program for a certain size and shrink or stretch it to fit, but this doesn't work with rectangles, as the pics get distorted.

Description. Some merchants miss this out entirely - some of them put the description in the promo field.
One of them had so many typos that it wasn't useable and some of them don't edit the text they put in, so the description gets cut short in the middle of a word. This kind of problem requires me to do manual edits, which defeats the object of having a database and my downloads have about 5,000 products in them, so they're a bit big for me to want to go in there by hand anyway.

And most merchants seem to have duplicate entries for a single product - meaning I output a page where half the items are identical.

It seems a pity that, having provided such a brilliant facility, merchants aren't really making good use of it.

I hope I'm not being too picky - after 6 months, I still consider myself new to this and I thought the product feeds would be the answer to my dreams - but I'm disappointed in the quality of the data.

Interested to know everyone else's thoughts on this.

[D-Mac]

Hi lakrasia

Images
Check out ImageMagick for resizing.
I personally don't understand why so many merchants offer only thumbnails, especially as there is no standardised thumb size anyway. Much better to give a larger image and let the affiliate resize it as they see fit.

Descriptions
Yes, the quality of these is extremely variable. One of the big problems is that many merchants use HTML to format their descriptions. However, a missing tag, e.g. < /TR> could completely wreck an affiliates site layout, hence the reason networks such as Awin require unformatted descriptions. (It is also why I added a space before /TR - it breaks this page too)

The trouble with long unformatted descriptions is that they can be pretty unreadable. A solution to this is for networks to allow HTML, but to validate it themselves to avoid breaking affiliates' sites. Alternatively the affiliates could perform their own validation. Personally I think the networks should offer this service. It is in their interests too.

Duplicate Entries
There are 2 reasons I can think of for this:

1. Carelessness (I know we have had this happen on occasion) Its easily done - somebody adds a batch of new products, without checking to see that every single one of them isn't already in the database.

2. Intentional spamming - no different from trying to dominate Google results really. Unless networks start to police their datafeeds people will begin to manipulate them in much the same way they do the search engines. (ps. we don't intentionally do this, but I am certain many will as datafeeds become more and more mainstream).

[Sofas-Direct]

Hi lakrasia

Good Feedback...................Not really sure about our datafeeds so cant comment........but will get our IT people to have a look.

Kind Regards

[matbennett]

I personally don't understand why so many merchants offer only thumbnails

The problem is that the system really needs a field for each. If we provide large images we get complaints, If we only provide smaller images we get complaints. Ideally I would like to provide both. We have them on our server (and provide them both as part of our advanced feed), but that isn't an option with ShopWindow yet.

Interestingly, the ShopWindow system itself deals with resizing, but the datafeeds don't, so one would imagine that this shouldn't be too hard to fix.

There are 2 reasons I can think of for this...

One or two of our products appear more than once, and I can assure you that it is neither down to carelessness nor "spamming".

The categories that we have to choose from on ShopWindow are not always that logical or complete (for example there is an "amethyst jewellery" category but not one for diamonds). Mapping the categories that a shop uses to those that Awin use is not always that easy. When our Awin feed is compiled, I know that any item that appears in more than one place on our site may appear in more than one logical category on Awin (e.g. a silver amethyst necklace could appear under "silver necklaces" and under "amethysts"). I don't think this is spamming, and if it was I am sure that Awin could remove it instantly my making product IDs unique.

Despite the above, I think that we only have a small % of products appearing more than once.

[D-Mac]

I agree Mat - there are technical reasons why a product may be duplicated too. I didn't consider that earlier.

Whatever the reasons though, I believe it is in the networks interests to ensure their data is as clean as possible. Of course they could argue that the affiliates should perform their own cleaning. Ultimately it is not safe to rely on merchants to perform their own cleaning, as there are possible advantages to having duplicates. (of course there are disadvantages too)

[lakrasia]

Thanks for all your comments. Imagemagick looks very useful, so thanks, D-Mac.

It's good to get a different perspective on it, though of course, the merchants giving me these problems haven't replied! Nor can I see how a pair of jeans can fall into 6 different categories, but of course other items probably would.

I can see that I'll be spending as much time on fixing the data as on building the website.

Cheers
Lakrasia

[Graham@Buyagift]

Lakrasia,

the best thing you can do is bring this to the merchants' attention, and also Affiliate Window. It doesn't help anyone if their feed's not up to scratch - the chances are the merchant's not aware of the problem.

Graham

[bulbo]

All of these "complaints" (if that is the right word) have been brought up on the AWin Shop Window forum (which now seems to be defunct) over 12 months ago.

I'm not sure how it's all created but my main bug-bear has always been the categories.

I always thought that AWin should provide default categories and if a merchant feels that some of their products don't fit into a certain category then they should be able to suggest a new category and AWin either approve or reject it.

Sometimes it seems as though cats are created by merchants just so their (and only their products appear under it) so they benefit from preferential placing within that category.

I hope I'm making sense here.

As for the image sizes... again, this has always been a problem but I think an option should be included for those without techie knowledge and merchants should be allowed to upload urls for Thumbs and Full-Size images - us affies then select the option that suits us.

Despite all the problems though, I still maintain that AWin's Data Feed is the best out there in terms of configurability and usability.

Personally, I would like to abandon it though and use only the CSV/XML feeds and configure the cats/sub-cats myself but in order to do this then it would be helpful if AWin would display the date when the database of a certain merchant was last updated.

[Martin]

All of these "complaints" (if that is the right word) have been brought up on the AWin Shop Window forum (which now seems to be defunct) over 12 months ago.

Marc assured me a while ago that the forum was dead but the important info contained within, our blood sweat and tears, was being compiled into help pages.

Just not sure how long we will have to wait for it.