What are Affiliate Data feeds?
December 11, 2008
Datafeeds are a large product file that you upload your site to display a merchant’s products. The most common format shows the product image, the price, and a link to the site(with your affiliate link). Datafeeds are advantageous to affiliate marketers because they increase click throughs and save time in implementing complex product links into your site.
A datafeed file is basically a large file of records for each product from a merchant. Some datafeed files are only a few hundred kilobytes, while others are hundreds of megabytes. Each product record has a field in it, for example the product url would be one field for each each record. Datafeeds are an advanced affiliate technique because your job is to turn this large file and integrate it into your site’s pages.
In order to use a affiliate datafeed, you will need to have access to creating a database and uploading it to your server. You will need a script to help you easily implement the file into your database. There are also some online datafeed processors, that will create a SQL database file from your datafeed file, so you can just import the SQL file into your database. Datafeeds come in different file formats, but the most common is .CSV, which can be be edited manually in a Excell spreadsheet.
Most affiliate networks do not allow you to download datafeeds from merchants, unless you are a large selling affiliate or want to pay a fee. Shareasale is one of the few that actually lets you download them for free. One important final thing to remember about datafeeds, is you will have to download fresh copies periodically, to make sure the datafeed prices match the real current prices.
