How much to create a product feed?

[William]

Hi

I recently asked a merchant (whos products would be ideal for one of my sites) if they would be likely to have a product feed available in the near future. They replied saying that they are interested in creating a feed for affiliates to use and are presently getting quotes for creating a feed and they would be interested in me quoting them a price to create a feed for them.

My question is what would be the going rate for a creating a feed for around 2500 products.

Also what would be the going rate for maintaining the feed.

Thanks

William

[Vivid]

I imagine that would depend on what sort of catalogue they already have. If for example they have an excel sheet with all these details then they are not too far of a CSV but if you had to start pretty much from scratch then I imagine the data inputting alone would make for a fairly pricey job.

In regards to maintaining the feed I would imagine that would also be heavily dependent on how often their product list was updated and to what level of detail.

No figures I'm afraid but it's fairly variable.

[Itchy]

Originally Posted by William My question is what would be the going rate for a creating a feed for around 2500 products. Also what would be the going rate for maintaining the feed. Thanks William

not a lot imoa

itll all be in the database so your just pull the info required from that..

and if its not in a database and their asking to do it by hand give it a wide berth unless you like to go jibber alot

[Adeel]

it can cost upto £1000 if u get it done from some software developer who would design a middleware code snippet to interact with the website database - extract the required information - and simply formulate in csv, xml or any other format you require..

BUT it wouldn't cost a penny if you are a bit techy...
if your merchant has database driven website then what you (or them) need is just extract the products table with some dynamic colums in there..
let me explain what is required and simply extracted from any database.

The Important Columns are:
1: id - unique code of the product to identify such as sku, internal code etc
2: Product Name - try to limit the words n don't forget to add the product keyword such as CPU or Processor in missing in the name field.. gud for SEO
3: Description - don't include html tags coz affiliates have their own layout structures.
4: Price - without $ or £ signs
5: Quantity - number if preferable else Yes or No
6: Product URL - webpage address
7: Image URL - image address such as www.xya.com/images/itsme.gif
8: Delivery Cost - if you can calculate dynamically based on weight normally
9: Category - your website category for affiliate to map with their system

Optional Columns
10: In Stock - Yes or No
11: Promotional message - such as special offer, new product, free delivery, 10% discount, pre order, rebate etc
12: Manufacturer - required for electronics
13: Type - new, used, refurbished etc
14: Expiry Date - if required
15: Weight - only numeric value with max two decimals ...

if you can design the feed with these attributes then it can be used on any price comparison engine, for affiliates, drop shipping websites and many more.. GET MORE OUT OF IT>>

let me know if you can add more stuff to it..

Ciao..

[hero]

Originally Posted by Adeel Category - your website category for affiliate to map with their system

the problem with the merchant replicating the marketing categories as they appear on their site is that they don't always reflect the nature of the product. A lot of gifts & gadgets merchants, for instance, tend to categorise under "boys toys" which can be anything from RC to electronics etc.

[William]

Thanks everyone for the replies.

The merchants site is a database driven site so it wouldnt be an enormous amount of work to create a feed for affiliates. I just didnt want to under bid for it.

[Adeel]

ur rite.. there is a lot of confusion involved with category mapping for an innocent merchant..

such as for price comparison engines - u wud need to cross map with their cats.. it entirely depends how you (affiliates or networks) request the cats from merchants..
for froogle, its simply easy to categorise the product with ur site cats and it wud do the job..
for trade doubler or other networks, u can map the cats on the networks but still merchants dont have to make the cat alterations in the feed...

let me know if there is anymore confusion...


Ciao..