Datafeed Feeds - when is the right time to offer them?

[MNSandy]

Many of you are strong advocates of feeds and such, but my question is - when one should offer them? What are the criteria? How many products? How many items?


p.s. This is my first post as well so nice to meet you all.

[Linda Buquet]

Hi MNSandy,

Welcome to 5 Star! I've seen you often at another forum. Glad to have you join us over here!

Not sure, but I think you mean DATA feeds, not RSS feeds???
(I changed the subject of your post to Datafeeds)

RSS feeds are generated automatically from blogs,
datafeeds are merchant product feeds.

Typically if you have lots of different products you should offer a feed right away. There would be no reason to wait. Ideally if you sell more than 10 or so products, offering a feed would be beneficial.

Be sure your feed is set up with good and correct categories and sub categories if applicable, both long and short description so affiliates can choose the option that fits their site best is also a good option.

Here's an article I wrote way back in 2003 for WebProNews.
Double Affiliate Conversion Rates with a Datafeed

Hope this helps.

[MNSandy]

Hi, Linda,

Thank you for your reply.

I'm glad I joined here as well. Hope we will have good cooperation.

Sandy

[John Jupp]

Sandy. Don't worry too much about the actual feed. You need the following:

Items marked with a * are a must.

field0 merchant_id
field1 merchant_name
field2 network_product_id
field3 product_id *
field4 upc
field5 ean
field6 mpn
field7 isbn
field8 model_number *
field9 product_name *
field10 description
field11 specifications
field12 promotional_text
field13 merchant_category_name *
field14 network_category_id *
field15 network_category_name *
field16 language
field17 brand_name
field18 merchant_deep_link *
field19 merchant_thumb_url *
field20 merchant_image_url *
field21 network_deep_link *
field22 network_thumb_url *
field23 network_image_url *
field24 delivery_time
field25 valid_from
field26 valid_to
field27 currency *
field28 search_price ** imperative known as offer price
field29 store_price *
field30 rrp_price *
field31 display_price ** imperative
field32 delivery_cost
field33 web_offer
field34 pre_order
field35 in_stock
field36 stock_quantity
field37 is_for_sale
field38 warranty
field39 `condition`
field40 product_type
field41 parent_product_id
field42 commission_group
field43 type

You will find the network shall add their relevant sections themselves. Affiliates will either use the network categories or the merchants own categories. I use merchant sub-sub categories for best description as many networks are not very good at producing feeds. This is because they have so many to do and merchants fail to ensure proper fields are added.

As you can see I have included such things as:
field4 upc
field5 ean
field6 mpn
field7 isbn

This is because databases for price comparison prefer international recognised product details. It ensures better search returns.

Keep your feed updated every week and if you can every 24 hours.

[MNSandy]

Thanks for such a great reply. If I may add when you say keep your feed updated means that most of you use something like FTP downloads for feeds rather than real time online source for feed?

[Linda Buquet]

Wow John, thanks for the detailed list of datafeed fields.
VERY nice!

Another idea, just to throw it out there.

Some merchants have concerns about affiliates not keeping their feeds up-to-date and then customers get mad because the price has changed. And it's true many affiliates aren't good at keeping feeds updated. The smart ones set up a chron job so it's automatic, but that's another topic.

So anyway an option for merchants who don't want to worry about pricing issues is to not show price on the affiliate site - just show product pic and details and then a button or link "click for more info" or "click for best price".

[John Jupp]

Originally Posted by MNSandy

Thanks for such a great reply. If I may add when you say keep your feed updated means that most of you use something like FTP downloads for feeds rather than real time online source for feed?

I use both.

FTP downloads direct into my MySQL database but also a CRON job which interrogates the network(s) every hour to see if a new feed has been submitted and if it has, update the MySQL database automatically..

[MNSandy]

Sounds good to me. I only wonder then what most of feed affiliates does regarding duplicate content?

[John Jupp]

Well I can't exactly reveal secrets as I can't commecially advertise and I don't want to explain how it's done either here but lets just say that even though I use the same feeds as everyone else I do NOT get slapped with duplicate content.

Also I am able to get Google to do something that Google is not supposed to do.....access MySQL.

One of my sidelines is software and script design. One of my clients Singapore Telecom has a net services division and they have their own affiliate marketing channel where they are advertising other merchants like any other affiliate. Using my scripts they hit the number 1 spot on yahoo and with a little metatag re-configuration I have suggested to them they'll hit the Big G's number 1 spot organically in Singapore for the term "online shopping". We'll also be supplying them with a widgets backend and frontend soon to produce widgets on the fly, plus an updated database system which extracts 3 million records and category maps the lot inside 4 hours.
Most of my websites for specific generic terms have been top spot for the last four years.

We're also talking to a leading marketing agency after they contacted me (one of the biggest in the UK with many major clients) to supply them a system for widgets too. This is something that any merchant should have to be honest so they can provide a front end for affiliates to log in to whereby they can then produce widgets on the fly with affiliate id embedded. Some networks now provide this following long consultation which we were in part involved with. More savvy merchants already have this and their sales have significantly increased. Now video widgets are all the rage and again this is something we're playing with.

Now affiliate marketing in the UK is significantly ahead of affiliate marketing in the US. Many of the ways they do things in the States is very old hat and I have to laugh when various firms try and trademark applications which started as open source. I'm seeing this with widget platforms based in the US at the moment. Heck, we built ours 3 years ago and a major part of the application is open source anyhow. So I can't wait for some tech firm to come along and try to sue me because they registered an application in the US. Any Court would find I pre-date them all. Anyhow, I digress.

Providing the display of the datafeed is pprepared by the affiliate in specific ways, there shall be no duplicate content issue.

I will reveal one way and that is that dynamically generated pages optimised into static html which are individually tagged does not constitute duplicate content.