Datafeed and Individual product links for Affiliates

[CalissaLeigh]

Affiliates want a datafeed. What's this? I know a little about datafeed but how can I get this to help my affiliates?

Also, I use Mals-E for my affiliate program. What can I do to provide individual product links for my customers. I'm not sure how to do it. If I could find a way to teach them how to make their own links with their ID I could put up a little tutorial.

Just curious if anyone knows...

[john925]

[Lynn Terry]

I dont know much about data feeds - from either angle. But would like to learn. Can anyone share some good resources?

[john925]

I didn't find many good resources on the Web. So all I had done was downloaded a free to download datafeed and took a look at it. I then thought of things that could be done with the information.

After playing around with a datafeed, I now have a few scripts that will re-arrange the order of the columns within the datafeed, delete uneccessary columns, upload the finished datafeed straight up to my MySQL Database.

Once all that is done, I then have a lot of products showing up on my site.

[netadventures]

A datafeed is a database of information about a merchant's product line - each record includes information about a specific product. You can use the datafeed with MySQL but you can also use , a cool program that merges the items you want in the feed with an html template. You end up with thousands of static pages which you then upload to your site.

BJ

[john925]

I had a look at Webmerge when learning about datafeeds and I thought that it was rubbish as it would have not benefited me. This is because it seemed to quickly make thousands of html pages. You have to then grab all of them seperate pages and upload them to your web host, which will take some time and will also take up alot of space.

So I then created my own one page php script using mysql so that it would automatically produce thousands of pages. I also then used .htaccess so that I could make the pages as if they just looked like normal html pages.

[netadventures]

Well, I wouldn't say Webmerge is a lot of rubbish, but it would definitely be much better to be able to use MySQL with the datafeeds. But for me that's a whole other learning curve I'm not techie at all, so would never be able to create my own PHP script. So for now Webmerge will have to do for me!

BJ

[Lynn Terry]

Hi BJ & thanks for the link!

I checked it out and it did the trick - after a few minutes of fiddling with the options. I also found a good tutorial for a better output, which was cool. I may spend some more time with this next weekend when it's quiet around here. Thanks again!

[john925]

[netadventures]

[john925]

[flensborg]

[john925]

[Lynn Terry]

[Baggs]

The trouble with datafeeds is that every one is different; even merchants offering similar products have a different feed format, which means that you need to look at each one when you set them up.

But once you have a way of reading that merchants feed, you can effectively updat your site daily (or whenever you like)

I don't believe Amazon has a CSV format - it is all XML. - and that is another challenge altogether!