I do a great deal of Affiliate Datafeed marketing, indeed it takes up probably around 80% of my affiliate marketing activity. I am constantly finding problems and issues with datafeeds provided by some very big names, poor quality, incorrect formatting, invalid XML, poorly formatted CSV files, but my biggest issues I have with merchants is the way in which many simply export their product database into a CSV file and think that is enough.
I know that merchants have affiliate schemes in order to off load some of the work involved in marketing their products to affiliates in exchange for commission, but there also needs to be some work put in by the merchant in order to help the affiliate marketer.
A simple export of their database is a good start, but this rarely meets the needs of a niche site. There are many pieces of software out there that help the affiliate marketer product a site, some provide facilities to filter the datafeed content in order that the affiliate marketer can cherry pick content from datafeeds, the software even allows you choose data from a datafeed to create menus and categories, however, this all falls down when the categorisation of the datafeed is simply a replication of the merchants website.
Datafeeds without good categorisation, columns for product brand and model number at the very least cause problems for the affiliate marketer.
With a little more input from the merchant the quality of the datafeed could be vastly improved, providing the affiliate marketer with more information to pick and choose what they want to use In their particular site.
The poor categorisation of datafeeds can be overcome with software solutions, I have just released a plugin for WordPress, Category Master, that allows you to add products to categories based on keywords. I have been using this myself for sometime now, it allows you to greatly improve the categorisation of your datafeed driven site, indeed it allows you to control the categories rather than rely upon those already provided in the datafeed.
I am working on more software that will help extract product information out of a datafeed, but this is a near technically impossible task, it would be perfect if all datafeed providers achieved some sort of standard, some are great and provide you with more information than you will ever need, others seemingly don’t want to invest in their affiliate programme
