Hard for me, easy for you? (product feed question)

[0james0]

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I have just launched a small affiliate site and would love to have an auto updated product feed for some of my merchants, especially the home and electrical ones.

I'm very new to this and although learning quickly, I'm still feeling well out of my depth.

To make life more difficult I used moonfruit to create my site, this has meant that although the site looks and functions great, certain things are harder to do.

I want the products to update with price and info like the banners do. Is this possible, or would it always require me to mannually remove an out of date product and replace with the new one?

So far the only way I've been able to get both the picture and the link to work is by mannualy editing the details of the HTML code the network give me for a banner, I just chop out the old banner parts and replace with the picture source and URL. This works, but I fear it will require lots of time from me to mannualy enter each product and also to keep them up to date.

Does anyone have any experience with moonfruit and if this is possible? There is now the option to have HTML in moonfruit, hence how I have my live banners. So far I've just opened up the web page in XML (don't even know what that means!) and copied the HTML from there. Some pages have thousands of items though, I'd be happy for a merchant to just auto update my site with details of their top 5 products.

Hopefully I made sense enough so you can answer it!

My website is: Magic Offers

thanks in advance
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[Jason]

I think Easy Content Units is just what you are looking for. Once created the units update automatically with price and stock availability.

You can customise them any way you like. To put them on your page, just copy and paste the code.

If you have any questions, please ask.

Jason

[0james0]

Jason that is perfect and a great tool.

However, my budget does not stretch to the full version (not yet anyway) and the free version would not be good enough as I couldn't have your ads instead of the products I wanted 20% of the time, on a page dedicated to one companies products it would not be good enough.

It's a great way to do it though, just not for me at this time.

Looks like I might have to learn somethings myself

[0james0]

I've read somewhere that people download the product feed in CSV or XML to a spreadsheet, it is then only a matter of updating said spreadsheet.

My problem is getting the info from the spreadsheet to my moonfruit site.

I know this can be done for free (sorry jason, but I have a DIY budget) but I need templates or something to get me going....

[accelerator]

These are the tools you can use:

Affiliate Marketing Shopping Development Tools

If you don't want to use any of these, you'll just have to do it from scratch. The downloaded feed will contain all the product info you need, so it is just a case of presenting this info on your website. You will need a certain amount of technical proficiency to be able to do this.

Rgds

[Brett]

I've read somewhere that people download the product feed in CSV or XML to a spreadsheet, it is then only a matter of updating said spreadsheet.

My problem is getting the info from the spreadsheet to my moonfruit site.

I know this can be done for free (sorry jason, but I have a DIY budget) but I need templates or something to get me going....

Hi James,

Do a search on google for SimpleXML, it is a new feature of php5 which makes using data feeds much easier, there are a fair few tutorials that will teach you enough to get you started.

The basis process is:

Download XML to your server
store in mysql database
use php to publish the data from the database

Hope this helps or inspires you to try something new!

Brett

[SimonQuick]

Hello James,

I've attached a document to this post; this gives you a step by step guide on how to implement product feeds into your website; its focused on buy.at feeds but most of it is transferable to other feeds you may be using.

I hope this helps

Regards
Simon

[John]

Jason that is perfect and a great tool.

However, my budget does not stretch to the full version (not yet anyway) and the free version would not be good enough as I couldn't have your ads instead of the products I wanted 20% of the time, on a page dedicated to one companies products it would not be good enough.

It's a great way to do it though, just not for me at this time.

Looks like I might have to learn somethings myself

Hi James,

Just wanted to clarify a point about how ECU works - on the 20% revshare option, we would still show the same products and the user would be taken to the same deeplink on the merchants site - we simply use our affiliate ID in place of yours on these links. We don't show "ads" in place of products.

HTH,

John

[0james0]

Hi James,

Just wanted to clarify a point about how ECU works - on the 20% revshare option, we would still show the same products and the user would be taken to the same deeplink on the merchants site - we simply use our affiliate ID in place of yours on these links. We don't show "ads" in place of products.

HTH,

John

I didn't realise that.

What a great proposition.

I'm further out of my depth here than I realised, so your option seems the best for me whilst I try and learn what I'm doing.

I'll be in touch and I'm sure some other friends of mine will to

[0james0]

Hello James,

I've attached a document to this post; this gives you a step by step guide on how to implement product feeds into your website; its focused on buy.at feeds but most of it is transferable to other feeds you may be using.

I hope this helps

Regards
Simon

That was really useful. However if you give me a spanner and an instruction booklet I still don't think I could fix a car!

Looks like I'm going to need a few goes at this before I crack it.

Plus I need to find out if I can even implement it into my moonfruit site!

I really appreciate your help

[MKJones]

Hi

I also found this incredibly confusing when I first wanted to mess about with datafeeds. Never thought I would be able to get it to work until I came across Affiliate Marketing Price Comparison Websites | AffiliStore. The good thing about the software was the tutorial found here: Affilistore | Affiliate Stores. Didn't take me long to pull in feeds from Affiliate Window and have them showing on the site. Even if you decide not to use the store after trying it out you will still learn a great deal. There is a forum for help and advice too. I will probably be using the store myself very soon for a section of a new site I am developing. Downside maybe is that the template is a bit hard to alter but there are ready made ones to be found on the forum, though the default site is pretty impressive in it's own right and would probably work well with your existing site setup.

Regards
Mark

[0james0]

Hi

I also found this incredibly confusing when I first wanted to mess about with datafeeds. Never thought I would be able to get it to work until I came across Affiliate Marketing Price Comparison Websites | AffiliStore. The good thing about the software was the tutorial found here: Affilistore | Affiliate Stores. Didn't take me long to pull in feeds from Affiliate Window and have them showing on the site. Even if you decide not to use the store after trying it out you will still learn a great deal. There is a forum for help and advice too. I will probably be using the store myself very soon for a section of a new site I am developing. Downside maybe is that the template is a bit hard to alter but there are ready made ones to be found on the forum, though the default site is pretty impressive in it's own right and would probably work well with your existing site setup.

Regards
Mark

I'll give it a look. Thanks.

What is your website address? I'd be interested in seeing what I could be achieving.

Easy Content Units looks like a very clever and slick piece of kit. My problem is getting the code to work in moonfruit! :td

[MKJones]

I don't have an active store at the moment. There are example sites to be found on the download page and others can be found on the forum. My own site - which I have created in the last week - uses the Associate-O-Matic :: Build a custom Amazon Associate Store with 1000's of items in minutes white label site on a part of it which is very impressive and a breeze to get up and running. Customizing it can be quite easy too as it accepts header and footer files so it is possible to embed it into anther site template. As the title hints it is for Amazon products only. My own site is here: Mobile Phones 4u and is now active but will need lots of work yet! I was thinking of using the Affiliastore to show Affiliate Window products but I will have to give it some thought as the site could very well be subject to heavy overkill .

UPDATE:

Referring to moonfruit!

Isn't that just a flash website? If you want to use a store all you have to do is install the store in a directory and then link to it from your moonfruit site. It will have a different look but then again it is a store. To make the store 'appear' as an integral part of your website then you would have to alter the shop template. I don't think you need to worry about that though for now just install it and put links on both the moonfruit site and store so that users can move back and forth between them. It doesn't require sharing of registration or login as it is affiliation link driven. All you would have to do is sign up to places like Affiliate Window to get the data feeds.

[0james0]

UPDATE:

Referring to moonfruit!

Isn't that just a flash website? If you want to use a store all you have to do is install the store in a directory and then link to it from your moonfruit site. It will have a different look but then again it is a store. To make the store 'appear' as an integral part of your website then you would have to alter the shop template. I don't think you need to worry about that though for now just install it and put links on both the moonfruit site and store so that users can move back and forth between them. It doesn't require sharing of registration or login as it is affiliation link driven. All you would have to do is sign up to places like Affiliate Window to get the data feeds.

I so nealry understand, but not quite!

That is what I want, but i'm stuck installing the store in a directory. Not sure where to even start.

Moonfruit is both a blessing and a pain at the same time. Site looks tidy, but very restrictive.

Your phone site looked very good. Considering its still work in progress it's going to be very slick.

[0james0]

Hi

I also found this incredibly confusing when I first wanted to mess about with datafeeds. Never thought I would be able to get it to work until I came across Affiliate Marketing Price Comparison Websites | AffiliStore. The good thing about the software was the tutorial found here: Affilistore | Affiliate Stores. Didn't take me long to pull in feeds from Affiliate Window and have them showing on the site. Even if you decide not to use the store after trying it out you will still learn a great deal. There is a forum for help and advice too. I will probably be using the store myself very soon for a section of a new site I am developing. Downside maybe is that the template is a bit hard to alter but there are ready made ones to be found on the forum, though the default site is pretty impressive in it's own right and would probably work well with your existing site setup.

Regards
Mark

I genuinley underestimated how difficult this would be to implement.

Fair play for those of you who have cracked it