I am currently facing significant problems with the quality of datafeeds provided by some merchants. I have blogged about this before which from memory quickly became a rant.
Although I feel like having a rant about these current problem I will endeavor to write a thoughtful post about the problems I am having in the hope that we might be able to make some headway to improve matters.
Break Away Cottages is currently suffering due to the quality of the data feed I am getting from the merchant. The merchant has re-arranged the setup of their data, where images are kept and where the booking pages are kept.The link to the images which is held in the data feed should not be a problem for affiliates, as simple re-import of the data should update the links and everything be fine, however the merchant has not corrected their datafeed.
This coupled with the merchant not informing affiliates about these changes has meant that earnings from Break Away Cottages have been zero for the last month.
The whole issue was highlighted by a reader posting a comment on Earning From Affiliates telling me that the images were not loading on the Break Away Cottages site. After investigating I found that these changes had been made.
There are things that I should be doing to mitigate this kind of problem happening, monitoring my sites, either manually or using some form of automated monitors and monitoring income on all sites so that I can use this as an indicator that things are going wrong.
I do monitor most of my stats, however the merchant I am using runs their own affiliate scheme, thus meaning that my monitoring tools (AffMeter pro) can not monitor those stats.
I have similar problems with the datafeeds that I used for My request List, discontinued products remaining in the datafeeds, prices changing on the merchants site while remaining unchanged in the datafeeds.
In my opinion the main issues with datafeeds in general, and I stress in general as there are some that are fantastic are as follows:
- Poor product descriptions
- Poor Categorization or products – sometimes seemingly to fit in with networks categorization
- Poor maintenance of datafeeds
- Irregular updates
Until such time as the merchant corrects the datafeed I will have to either put up with the fact that the images on the site are not loading which is really not an option or write a string replace in php to correct each image link, the problem with that is it will have to be done each place that an image is shown.
Either way a real pain in the bum.
