working with datafeeds

[jonathanm]

Ok, so I'm new here, and new to this whole scene, so still in the research stage really, and looking for some guidance. I know this has been touched on before, but would like to stimulate a frank discussion about this topic

I'm looking at datafeeds at the moment, and I'm seeing for myself the multiple problems I've read about here and on other forums.

1 different merchants have different category names
2 merchants have different product names for the same product
3 feeds have grammatical errors or unusable/bad html tags in product descriptions.
4 special offers on the merchants site are not in the feed.
5 descriptions/promo text in the feed is badly formatted and needs extra work to make usable.
6 photos and thumbnails are either bad or non consistent and look rubbish without individual attention.
7 stock levels do not appear reliable and so are useless.
8 please add your own gripes here

So......

How to address these issues? I can see a few possibilities...

1 pester networks and merchants to get more usable data
2 write extremely complicated scripts/apps that parse a datafeed and turn it into something useable, but will need human editing to ensure correctness.
3 write less complicated scripts/apps that need human interaction to make decisions about any issues it finds.
4 have a manual process to work through csv/xml files and process each one individually, time consuming but you know they're done right.

I'm sure other affiliates know exactly what I'm talking about here more than i do, so what I'd like to know is.....

1 What are people actually doing now to deal with this stuff.
2 what do people think is the way forward for datafeeds?

part of me acknowledges that if something is difficult, then I have an advantage if I can work out how to use it. This is an advantage for the more technical affiliates, but not a good situation for the rest of us and also for the networks, and merchants also.

So to recap my main point - how do I parse/process this mess of data that i can grab? and should i have to do this or should it really be easier for us?

Thanks,

Jonathan

[experienceadvertising]

This is a very common issue with affiliates. I have dealt with this as well and the way to process the data is with scripts to grab the data from the CJ API or whatever feed and display the products or categories you want to on your site. Unless the feed is formatted well for you, you may have to find a good php or asp guy to handle this data and display it as you want to...there are some good resources out there of you go looking in Google.