My latest project involves the use of datafeeds from a variety of merchants, these merchants are at the moment all selected from Trade Doubler simply for easy of formatting the datafeeds.
While working on this project have become very frustrated by the varying quality of the datafeeds from the merchants. It appears to me that many merchants overlook the importance of the datafeeds, perhaps these are the merchants that invest less time and effort into their affiliate marketing.
Today it is not good enough to simply setup and affiliate program with a few links and graphical banners. Affiliate marketing has cot allot more advanced than that, price comparisons, niche store sites and more mean that the importance of the datafeed is utmost.
With the affiliate industry and affiliate marketing getting more advanced, the investment by affiliate marketers producing more and more advanced software and websites to promote merchants products can at times be astronomical.
When merchants provide poor quality datafeeds they only prove to alienate people who are working hard, investing money promoting their products.
In the past few days I have dropped 4 merchants from my new project because their datafeeds are simply not up to the desire quality.
Where actually is my complaint? Well for me there are multiple factors that have me frustrated:
- whole datafeeds lumped into one to two categories when they should be in many sub-categories
- images missing even where an image url is provided
- spelling mistakes
- product urls missing or invalid (how are we supposed to send traffic?)
- datafeeds being out of date
- poor quality copy such as ‘bottle of wine’ or ‘table’ as a description is not good enough
To give Tradedoubler their due, they are attempting to grade the quality of the datafeeds, with premium datafeeds being of a better quality, however with a project such as mine I am relying upon a wide range of products in aorder for it to be a success and if I can not rely upon the datafeeds that drive it my not inconsiderable amount of financial and time investment will prove to have been wasted.
At the moment I am thinking if the Merchants themselves can not be bothered then why should I?
Frustrated…
5 comments
Pink says:
March 18, 2008 at 7:25 pm (UTC 1)
I know exactly how you feel. I have a website that uses the datafeed of a merchant that has not updated it since the 16th of January! Unfortunately they have no suitable competitors that have feeds so I’m stuck with them.
Digitalquill says:
March 18, 2008 at 11:09 pm (UTC 1)
I am wondering what can be done about this. As you say there are times when if you want to continue with a project you have no choice.
I have spent 3 hours this evening sorting out a datafeed moving products into the correct categories, the problem with this is that when I want to update that datafeed what do I do? I have to do it all again, this is something that the merchant should be doing, not just throwing out a database of products without any thought or effort.
One thing I think is worthwhile and maybe we can start some kind of campaign, if everyone emailed the affiliate manager for their relevant merchant whenever they had any of these problems, perhaps that would highlight the issue to both the networks and the merchants and maybe just maybe we will get some movement and improvement on the datafeeds.
Pink says:
March 19, 2008 at 9:02 am (UTC 1)
I’ve emailed the affiliate manager three times now lol. As a plus to the dire datafeed situation it pushed me to find other creative ways to promote Merchants without datafeeds in the same sector and my earnings did rise dramtaically.
Also regarding your problem with the categories there is a free script called Affilistore which creates datafeed sites and enables you to easily build your own custom navigatigation.
Digitalquill says:
March 19, 2008 at 9:45 am (UTC 1)
Pink
Thanks for your comments, I use AffMeter quite extensively and like you I spend the time setting up my own categories of products. However the project I am currently working on is or a much larger scale which is why I am being hampered so much by these issues.
I took the time last night to email 5 of the merchants affiliate managers, lets wait and see if anything comes back! I don’t hold out much hope, but if everyone did the same perhaps some action will happen.
Pink says:
March 20, 2008 at 1:13 pm (UTC 1)
I’ve been waiting three months for Evans to update their datafeed now and I’ve just realised that loads of their products are now dead links it’s been that long – they don’t even say they are sold out or redirect to the homepage! To kill it all they’ve increased commissions to 10% for the next month – but how am I supposed to take advantage of that – it’s so frustrating!