In my experience feeds direct from the merchant are better quality than those regurgitated by the network. I’ve seen network supplied feeds with invalid formatting, data months out of date and purchasing deeplinks that 404. Junk basically (& this was a major UK brand on a big network).

Remember too a feed can get pulled by the merchant at any time, don’t place a big bet on any one feed unless you have a specific agreement with the merchant, and always have a back up plan.

I manage the feed system here at buy.at

A big thing I always try and press on affiliates is that you can very rarely just plug a bunch of feeds straight into a database and your site will instantly convert.

The varying backend systems and procedures of each merchant means its very rare for them to be able to provide a perfect fit. We run a lot of bespoke modifications across feeds which work on issues such as product name normalisation, re-categorisation of products, vertical specific naming and feed structures, removal of HTML from descriptions and data cleansing. Unfortunately there is only so much we can do as sometimes as the data literally is not available.

While I am all for a completely standardised format and making things easier for everyone, its also worth noting that different verticals have different attributes; to accomodate this we have a different recommended structure for each of the main verticals.

The best uses of feeds I’ve seen are when the affiliate takes small sections from a variety of feeds and mixes it with their own content and/or other technologies. An obvious example would be the travel sector where feeds are integrated with Google maps and there are also some excellent mashups between ticketing and music retailers starting to appear.

On the subject of categorisation, most of you will know that merchants categorisation varies massively. To try and accomodate this, we (and other networks) have our own internal categorisation system. We go through the merchants feed on a category by category basis and match the merchants choice up to our own internal structure. This is illustrated well in the Create-A-Feed tool our buddies at Awin have; I am very jealous

Could you recommend a resource to learn how to use feeds?

Thanks

Lots of people (especially networks) say ‘feed’ when, to me, they really mean, a ‘widget’. The publisher usually adds a little Javascript to their page where they want the widget to appear. When this is loaded by a browser the Javascript gets executed, which usually loads some data and formatting from the merchant or network, which is then rendered into the page by the browser, so the user sees the result.

On the plus side these widgets are very easy to integrate into a site. The negatives are that search engine spiders won’t execute that Javascript, so won’t see the result, so won’t count the widget as ‘content’ at all (fresh or not), and that the publisher’s control of what gets rendered can be minimal. (I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong).

To me a ‘feed’ is a data file published by a network or merchant containing some sort of product information, often including price and availability. Usually the publisher downloads this ‘behind the scenes’ and loads it into their own database, they then publish it as they see fit.

On the plus side this means massive flexibility – the feed is the raw material to build whatever you want. However this takes programming ability and server resources, it’s not an out of the box solution.

From a network point of view, they provide their own category trees; however these tend not to be that detailed, as they have to be a “one size fits all” solution for all of their merchants across many many verticals.

I think to improve this situation, it’s down to the networks to provide a far deeper and richer categorisation tree, and then for the merchants to play their part by spending the time on correctly mapping their categories over.

Only then can I get rid of my massive Excel spreadsheet, full of macros and 20+ lookup tables, which is now far too complicated for me to remember how the hell it works!!!

James