AdTool - Waste Of Time?

[Lee_Owen]

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I've read a lot on product feeds on this forum but I didn't think it was this bad. Now talk about XML and CSV and I haven't really got the abilty to use these. AdTool is released and finally I've found something, like their previous content units, that I can really use.

However I'm looking through the programs and finding there's very little in the way of products in the product feeds. I started off with ASOS last weekend, entered a few keywords, dress, hat, skirts, shirt, now I'm getting somewhere, however that feed died last weekend and is yet to come back. After that bout of frustration and swearing a lot I returned a couple of times since to try again, I used Yoox, great, keywords bringing up what I need again, 20 of this 20 of that, build, build.

But there it stops, I go to John Lewis, they show hardly any clothes, not enough to build a site with anyway, I try Boden, they don't have skirts, yet sell them on their site. Littlewoods don't have skirts or dresses and so on and so on...

So in short, am I wasting my time? should I expect a fashion retailer to have 20 hats, skirts, bras, shirts, tops, shoes on file or is it always as scatty as this? What I deemed a good idea for a site now seems to be just a pain in the arse with very little content to go with it.

I don't think AdTool is a waste of time, although keywords are a waste of time on merchant search and you need to enter keyword in the name field - is that where I'm going wrong? but merchants not uploading substantial or even limited products for their feeds probably is.

All I wanted was to promote 20 merchants from the start in 10 to 16 different areas from skirts to shirts and dresses to footwear and display 20 products for each keyword from each merchant.

Doesn't seem a lot to hope for, does it? Are any other networks good for the above? Would it help if I just bide my time and ask the individual merchants to update their feeds? Am I doing this whole product search thing wrong? Friday night and the whole weekend, want to work on a project, but can't.

***Now Yoox has gone down as well, although there may be an update in progress? Am I going wrong somewhere?

[Lee_Owen]

I've figured out why Yoox stopped working, they removed a product in each listing, so was reduced to 19 and I needed to top it up for it to work again. At a loss for an answer to the rest though.

[Barry]

Hi ya Lee, keep at it mate.

I can't give u anything more constructirve than that at the mo far to far gone on a friday night, but I know exactly how you feel -ain't it a pain when your at your full and everyone else is asleep?

The only thing I can recoomend is the product feed on Affiliate Future,- if your empty some results try theirs they have quite a good selection now.

B Good!!

[NetNeo]

Know the feeling too...get a nice idea you wanna run with only to find you cant get the right feed from the merchants even though you know they sell a huge amount of what you need

Sittl...onwards and upwards.

I have found the new Paid On Results feed very good. You can select as many of the merchants as you want (same idea as AdTool) but you can set up a HTML emplate within POR on how to display them. If you have a php site its then simply an include statement to get your page finished. Very fast when you get your head round it, and very effective. Would also stop you having to keep checking that a product hasnt disappear and prevents your feed from working as POR seems to automatically "make up" the missing item from other merchants but still within your guidelines.

[christh]

Been playing around with AdTool a bit. I do like it, and think it has a lot of potential, however some things do bug me about it. Say I've made a template that'll display 10 items. Then I make a feed to select some items. If that feed then drops below 10 products, the AdTool script on my site just dies completely and displays nothing, rather than the remaining 9 or whatever items.

This is a real pain as there doesn't seem to be any flexibility in this, unlike POR's one. I'd like to display all items in a feed on a single page for certain items. But I'd have to create a template that'd display enough items per page to cover that - and then if one single item is removed from the feed then nothing will be displayed at all.

So is there any way around this limitation? And yes, you can tell I really don't want to try my hand at integrating a proper feed