Technical Data Feed questions

[jjblond]

We have been working on our website with our website designer/ database specialist. She is unfamiliar with Commission Junction and has been unable to get her technical questions answered by CJ. We are newbies to all of this and cant seem to help her out, especially since we are unfamiliar with language. This may seem like a lengthy thread of questions, but I am going to post what we have been trying to figure out for about 6 weeks now.
If you have an answer to any of them or can guide was in the right direction, we would greatly appreciate it. Thank you!!!!

Here is what she has been asking CJ with no help.

1) How do we get data from their site to ours:
- Do we download or transfer data files and then import the data into our own database?
- Do we use live XML data feeds?
- If both are available (as in Commission Junction) we need to know which is the best (fastest, will give us the results we want)
(see questions below)

2) Do either or both of the methods above allow us to retrieve a list of ONLY the merchants (and just one record for each) we have joined and an example of their rebate/coupon info (with CJ, as you know, the list includes dozens of entries for each merchant; through code, I can make only one instance of each get displayed, but only after we get ALL of the data from CJ -- so it is SLOW)?

3) Do either or both methods allow us to display main product categories, as well as, product sub categories -- from only the merchants we have joined?

4) Do either or both methods allow us to, based on selected category and/or sub category, display products from that category and from only the merchants we have joined?

5) Do either or both methods allow us to link products to the merchants selling them?

6) In any of the situations above, will we have to transfer ALL of the data from the affiliate marketing source (CJ, etc.) and then weed through it on our end? Or can we send detailed queries to the source and get specific data back?

7) Does the source provide TECHNICAL support (not just customer support, but real technical support from people who know XML and know the data we're working with).

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Jaime,

Year ago i used to know quite a bit about CJ feeds but not any more. They used to have some good help sections on feeds but I just searched for you and can't find anything. I'm sure they have something and if you put in a support ticket surely they have detailed info they can give you.

The was it used to work if you made under a certain amount in sales you had to pay for the feed. Then I think you could pull something like up to 10 of your merchants, so no way they'd make you pull every merchants data. Hundreds of stores with 60,000 product each would be unmanageable. I heard some affiliates say even if you only pull 10 feeds it's still a lot to deal with.

All that said once you pull all the feeds yes you can sort by category and only show the product cats or sub cats you want.

So yes I'm sure you can do what you want feed offer lots of flexibility. I just can't give you all the techy answers and am really surprised it's not easier to find the info at CJ.

If you find the technical hassles aren't worth fighting with there are services that make it easy so you
don't have to do any programming at all.

Popshops is one of the best ones.
So easy a 3 year Old can Do it!

[jjblond]

I think she is finally figuring out.

[vereecjw]

Jaime,

This maybe too late to help, but CJ has webservices that can be used to pull most data. In all honesty their webservices (and most of the affiliate networks) are trash. It is best to pull the data completely and store it on a local db. You can run that scrape in about 20 minutes to an hour every day.

Your coder can get access to the webservices at webservices DOT cj DOT com. (Sorry no URLs in new member posts)

The simplest method for doing these is a series of successive calls to the following functions.

Calling and cycling these will get you all of your related data.
getLinkTypes - under support services
-This will return the different variety of link types and displays as stored in the CJ system
Advertiser Search Service
- This can be queried using all of the Link types in order to get back a feed of all of the advertisers in their system. There is a value in the response to state if you have a relationship with them yet, if it is pending, etc.
Link Search Service
- This can be queried to pull the collection of links/ads offered by an advertiser based on the result from above.

This isn't the most efficient by code. But it builds out your database and keeps it relatively up to date (24 hours).