Lots of data, easier feeding.

[Marien]

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Hi guys,

Im struggling to find a proper way to add my CSV feeds.

Here's the thing,

I have one, or multiple datafeeds, but names are not identical, neither are categories.

So you look at the UPC, or the EAN. But the thing is, not every merchant has them in their Feeds. And then there's the problem that some shops add a new product in the sheet, per color for let's say a pair of shoes.

Im struggling to find a way to make this easier, i can't imagine going through every single CSV file, many with tons of products, and see if they are a like for the system to feed them to the website.

Any tips or any ideas on this? Is there a way to code something that could identify on product names instead of EAN, or something like that? :cry

Someway to filter feeds and have them processed.

[SimonQuick]

Hi Marien,

Hope you are doing well.

I manage the product feed system here at buy.at

The matching of products could be considered the holy grail of product feeds As time goes on, more and more merchants are adding UPC/EAN/MPN data as the importance of this data becomes clearer and clearer.

There are a variety of ways to match the products without this data but Im afraid that you'll need to do some manual work to get the matches as you wish. Some people do SQL "LIKE" matches (MySQL :: MySQL 5.0 Reference Manual :: 11.4.1 String Comparison Functions) on the product names. Others will record the EAN from other feeds and match it up to products in feeds that do not have the EAN data.

We've developed a guide which walks you through the integration of a product feed into your website using PHP. Section 7 details how to filter feeds by category - this is especially useful if you work in niche sites (e.g. you only sell CDs).

http://files.perfiliate.com/solution...FeedsGuide.pdf

I hope that gives you a starting point.

Thanks
Simon

[Marien]

Hi Simon,

Thank you for your reply.

The main issue is that shop a: has a different way of listing their products, than shop b:.

Shop a lists the product per color, or per variation,
shop b lists the product only by it's name.

Im thinking shop b does it better because if you go to the site, you will see an option to change color or variation on the product anyway.

so i think i''ll go with that and basically start off with a clean datafeed and get something going, which takes less time to adjust if it's already imported into the system.

eg: it will also have an option for merchants or for myself, to manually change the prices etc per store.

[SimonQuick]

Hi Marien,

Totally understand agree with your point. We always try and get as much data as possible to ensure the feeds are as rich as possible, unfortunately this isn't always possible as either the merchant can't supply the data or simple does not have it.

Looking to the future, as feed building companies such as Fusepump start to become more prominent, I'm confident that data feeds will reach a new level of richness and make things far easier for affiliates like yourself to ingest feeds into your site.

We have a fair amount of bespoke modifications running in the background which amend, add and format feeds and this will continue to grow. I'll shortly be releasing a beta of a new feed methodology on buy.at which should definitely make things easier for all - keep an eye out for updates on this

Thanks
Simon