Upcoming Product Feed Changes - Please Update your links

[TD Nick]

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I sent out this information to everybody using the old feed format but just in case you did not receive it I’d like to give you a quick heads up about some upcoming changes to our product feed system.

As you may have noticed TradeDoubler introduced the “Feed Export” some time ago in the product feed interface. This functionality will soon replace the feed subscription, which will be phased out on November 21. You will need to change your product feed download links over to the new feed export links.


Benefits

The new feed export system has several improvements and benefits over the old subscription system:

- Faster access to product feeds, no need to subscribe to a product feed and wait for up to 24 hours anymore.
- The product feed files are generated much faster allowing us to provide publishers with updated data faster
- Product feed files are always generated and up to date for all publishers (avoiding previous issues with some publishers getting old or empty files)
- We are also phasing out the Excel feed format as this was not widely used, was limited to 65k products and also quite resource intensive to create.

The new PF download links

The new links are similar to the old links that were in use last year.

http://pf.tradedoubler.com/export/ex...=2554&pfId=701


You can quickly change some of the parameters to get the desired product feed URL. Most of the parameters are pretty self-explanatory but here is a quick explanation:

- &a=1010101 as always is your site ID, you will need to have applied to the relevant program with the site ID you use in order for a feed to work.

- &zip=true if you change this to false you will download the uncompressed feed directly from our servers. This can be useful for testing the feeds to quickly see the content without having to download and extract the feed. However it is not recommended to be used when updating feeds and regularly downloading feeds as the feeds will be much larger in the uncompressed form and will use up a lot of bandwidth both for us and you.

- &format=csv this can be either csv or xml

- &programId= fairly obvious, this is the program ID for the advertiser

- &pfID= this is the unique TradeDoubler product feed ID



The New Product Feed Product Links

The new product feed product links are also a bit different from the old ones.

http://pdt.tradedoubler.com/click?a(...prod(73432087)

The old format will still work however if you are adding any additional parameters to this, such as EPI then you will need to keep the parameter formatting consistent. The order of the parameters does not matter so you can add the epi parameter at the beginning, the end or even in the middle.

E.g. http://pdt.tradedoubler.com/click?ep...)prod(73432087)

http://pdt.tradedoubler.com/click? a(407311)p(50092)prod(73432087)epi(yourepicode)

If you are adding in an EPI parameter for each product using the old format &epi= you will need to update this to epi() as combinations of the new and old format may not always work.

This will NOT work for example
http://pdt.tradedoubler.com/click?ep...)prod(73432087)


This spreadsheet lists all the available product feeds in the UK and has the new links to all the feeds. When using the spreadsheet you will need to input your own site ID at the top and in order for the feeds to work you will need to have applied to the program with the site ID you are using. But I’m sure you know this already.

http://hst.tradedoubler.com/file/206...uctfeedsuk.xls

If you have any questions feel free to contact me on lars.farstad@tradedoubler.com

Regards
Lars Farstad

[pricethat]

can you confirm that the product ids within the new feeds are EXACTLY the same ids as in the old feeds before we change over. If they are not then you are going to mess up a lot of peoples systems,

[TD Nick]

Yes, I've just got this confirmed from the developers and the product IDs will remain the same with the new feeds.

Lars

[Jeff]

I wasn't aware that the old product feeds were being removed, I've just checked my email account and I definitely didn't receive an email about it.

My old subscription feeds have only recently stopped working so I came here to see if anyone else had the same problem.

[darrenw]

Please ignore the rant that appeared earlier here - it turned out to be all my fault, and not TradeDoubler's at all - Apologies to TD!