CJ Product Feeds very disappointing

14-06-03

Have obtained a number of merchants feeds via CJ but have found the majority several months out of date.

Good examples of feeds are Comet, MFI & Boots.

Bad examples of feeds which appear to be mostly several months out of date meaning a significant number of links are dead are:

Marks & Spencer; Kays; Argos Additions; Littlewoods Extra; Mcords.

Surely the whole point of product feeds are that the merchant provides you with up-to-date data?

Surely it is not difficult for a merchant to update a product feed as they will have the data on their website supplied by a database.

I have raised this issue with CJ and they thanked me for pointing out the problems.

Am I unlucky with my merchants or have other affiliates not been impressed by CJ product feeds?

It may be in the affiliates, networks and merchants interest to hassle merchants into providing high quality data feeds. Poor quality data feeds are no good at all!

16-06-03

Hi Andy

Marks & Spencer Data Feed is dead, we had to take it off line in Januray as the development was pulled. We hope to launch a new datafeed with top 200 products soon.

Thanks

Helen

16-06-03

I had loads of problems with the Argos database, with links just going to error pages, and lots of products included several times (which is because they're included in the catalogue in different places)
They seem to have sorted out the link problem.

Some of them don't have a url for a picture of the product, others have no or inaccurate category data, some are way out of date and others are for merchants that have closed down.

But if you can extract the good data from the rubbish it's a useful thing to have, it just takes a lot of work.

16-06-03

Thanks Helen.

Pleased to hear an improved product feed is in the pipeline for Marks ampersand Spencer.

JF,

I agree that if you spend a lot of time dissecting a datafeed and discarding the invalid links, you can obtain a good feed. But affiliates should not be given poor/out of date feeds in the first place. I will choose to work with merchants who provide quality regularly updated feeds.

17-06-03

I manage Irv's Luggage Warehouse and Executive Essentials on CJ. We send CJ a new feed daily to ensure database is always up to date.

By popular request we have also added a free, private feed for affiliate that don't want to pay CJ. Affiliates tell us our private feed is much more user friendly and customizable than CJ's.

In any case, I would strongly encourage you all to find and add good datafeed merchants. Since we have added the feed our top affiliate's sales have increased dratamically for those that use it. Since we added the private feed in April our sales have skyrocketed, which means affiliate commissions have too.

According to a CJ Press Release, direct product links (ie: CJ Product catalog) double conversion rates on the average.
www.cj.com/corporate/press_7327.jsp