I do recommend Popshops for both the sophisticated affiliate as well as the beginner.

As an affiliate agency, I’ve seen affiliates with datafeeds do amazing work, increasing sales by tens of thousands a month.

But even then you need to know what your doing before you make a lot of money doing this!

Duplicate Content – By default (on the free version of ECU), ECU’s can’t be read by the search engines, so there’s no issue there. On the Pro version, you can make them visible to the SE’s, which could open up the doors of duplicate content. That’s why we offer the ability to add custom descriptions to merchants feeds, meaning you still get the automatic benefit of updated product information, deeplinks, product images etc, but can rank for your own unique content.

Dealing with out of stock/removed products – We’ve built a tool into ECU that not only shows you at a glance what products are no longer available, but also sends you an email to let you know that there are missing items, and if you wish allows you to continue to show the product with an “out of stock” image.

Standardisation – Yup, this has always been an issue with feeds – We’ve done all the mapping with ECU so that all the feeds pump out the same information via ECU – no need to map anything yourself.

@Mark – regarding your quote – I’m trying to raise the idea that by using data feeds, you can keep your website content fresh, encouraging the spiders to return more often. I neglected to mention that in addition to data feeds one should compliment the feed with additional content, ensuring key pages have unique titles, meta descriptions, page headings, image alt tags and all main on-page elements known to effect search engine ranking. These page elements should be built after careful keyword research related to the products in the feeds you are using. It goes without saying that building high quality links back to your deep pages is essential. Focusing on one niche is a faster and more effective strategy to get into affiliate sales using data feeds. The data feed can be used to supply in-house software with the key, up-sell elements for an affiliate site like price, image, product name and the basis of a description (covered in more detail further down my reply). I originally saw it out of the scope of this post to go into the above points – my apologies, and I hope this clarifies my statement. I’m happy to clarify any of the points just made further, if anyone has any questions.

@Mike – A feed in most cases can be used how the affiliate chooses. Obviously there are occasional restrictions – and it’s best to explain how you would like to use the feed to the supplier before integrating in your software to ensure you are not breaching any conditions. One successful strategy I have used is by writing software that will go in and populate a customized CMS type system. This way I can tweak each product in the feed individually. If a product becomes unavailable from the original feed merchant, I simply edit the affiliate link to forward the visitor to a new merchant. In the unlikely case that the product is unavailable from any merchant with an affiliate program – I’d recommend, 301 redirecting the visitor to the product’s parent category.

So essentially the key points are:

Ensure product pages created from a feed can be updated with customized information that will not be removed, or updated when the feed is fetched (including what was mentioned in my reply to @Mike)

Keep an eye on merchants for products becoming unavailable.

Keep additional merchants on hand in case the product becomes unavailable at one.

@Paul – Agreed. If you’re using feeds from multiple sources the only answer is to write an import script for each source. As idea is to get your scripts tweaked to get common fields – then supplement the incoming data with the required information. When a new feed is parsed, it only updates fields that have not been manually updated (usually price and image, occasionally name, url)– in other words if human changes have been made, these are kept. The solution to categorization is to manually port the categories on the first feed and then future feeds from the same source can follow this same rule.

@Chris – Hopefully I’ve clarified this in my above replies. The answer is to compliment the feed with additional content which you’ve created.

Paul, I agree, the quality of datafeeds is very variable, and can make working with data from multiple merchants very frustrating. Working in a small niche should make it a bit easier to set up some automated categorisation rules. You could set up general rules to apply to all datafeeds, and merchant specific rules for those with exceptionally messy data.

Chris, duplicate content is definitely a problem if you want to rank for the product name on your product pages. You could try adding a review section to your product pages so that your visitors create unique content for you

So, how do you work around the duplicate content issue?