Help Editing Datafeeds in ShareaSale

[lufbra]

I have never done anything with datafeeds before, but just for the heck of it I downloaded one from my Share A Sale account. It was huge (46 mb's), and in order to use it myself I would have to edit it to add my Share A Sale account number. So I opened the file in Wordpad and tried the "Find and Replace" all feature, the file just "hung" and I had to resort to giving it the "three fingered salute"!

So my question is, what kinda program do you guys use to edit such a large file in the method I show above, or am I doing this completely the wrong way?

Thanks in advance.

[Linda Buquet]

Not sure but this may help. Teli one of our mods wrote a good article about modifying feeds.
Affiliate Datafeed Tips - Avoiding Duplicate Content Penalties

Also with SAS you can use Popshops then you don't need to do any coding at all.
PopShops Hot Datafeed Store Builder - FREE & Easy

Additionally SAS has their own storebuilder and some datafeed merchants offer that option.

[Linda Buquet]

Oh and I don't think you need to add your affiliate ID in SAS.

I'm not certain I've never done it, but with most networks the cool thing about pulling feeds from within the network is that it auto adds your affiliate id to every link.

Hey Teli or other SAS datafeeders??? Can you help???

[lufbra]

Well with this one, it states to replace "YOURUSERID" with your actual user ID.

Not that I think I'll be using it, it's a bit too large for my webspace at the moment.

[Brian - ShareASale]

lufbra,

It sounds like you chose one of the "really" large feeds that are hosted on ShareASale. Some of them do include things like !!USERID!! where you will need to replace that info.

I don't recommend WordPad at all for that, as that application wasn't designed to hold a file that size in its memory. You will need to use a database application such as Access , MySQL or others in order to open and manipulate that data...

If this is your first time with a datafeed I would recommend either contacting the merchant to get a smaller version of their topsellers, etc... or working with a datafeed that is a little smaller first - prior to going back to the big one.

[Linda Buquet]

Appreciate the advice Brian. I wasn't sure about that one!

Thanks so much for stopping by to answer some questions.
I know how busy you must be!

[Teli]

I know this is an older thread, but this may come in handy for others looking for a way to modify their datafeeds.

For a file that large, you probably want to use something other than Notepad or Wordpad because it will cause those programs to hang or take forever to open, plus it's much easier to make a mistake with editing.

Instead, you should probably use Microsoft Excel (or OpenOffice Calc if you don't already have MS Office). When the file is imported, you can use the Excel Find/Replace function which is usually pretty fast to get through them all and you can even use it to sort your datafeed for easier modifications.

Also, I just finished up a short (7 page) guide on preparing a datafeed for use. I actually decided to whip it together while I was modifying a datafeed to use on one of my sites. For the walk through, I'm using a datafeed from Sharasale and MS Excel for editing; it has plenty of screen shots so you can see what I'm doing.

You're welcome to download it if you like: Datafeed Preparation Guide

It was written mainly for WPDFI users, however, I believe anyone working with datafeeds and wanting to learn more about formatting can benefit from it.

Hope it helps,
~ Teli

[Linda Buquet]

Very nice guide. Thanks Teli!

[Teli]

Thanks, Linda. Just trying to be helpful.

~ Teli

[Brian - ShareASale]

There is also a video presentation with examples on MySQL and PHP from our "Web Concepts 2.0" class at the Affiliate Summit...

Shareasale.com - Affiliate Tracking Software, Reporting, and network of affiliates.