Hello, I'm new to affiliate marketing and I've recently secured a scheduled datafeed from my affiliate. Now, I want to know how is best to proceed. Has anyone here had good experience with scripts or full software packages that can handle datafeeds from an affiliate to make it into a full shop with lots of good features. Its this or get a good programmer to make a custom script to handle the datafeed. I'm interested in the following: - needs to have a good architecture, - produce clean urls, - category and product pages, - product pages that include extra features such as "email this product to a friend", "leave a comment", "blog about this product" etc. All of this with room for a programmer to add more features. Any caveats?
I'm not aware of any software that does this, since every datafeed is different. If you're using CJ or any other semi-big affiliate company like ShareASale, there might be available solutions to buy. I definitely recommend getting a custom store built for you by a programmer though. That way your store will be unique (except for the datafeed content that you might want to pad with some extra content to avoid duplicate filters).
I'd go with hiring a programmer to build a custom store. Even with a "large" affiliate network like Linkshare, we get several XML datafeeds that are all different. A couple of them aren't even valid XML. We have separate, but similar scripts parse each datafeed and store the information into a single database from which we build the store.
Thanks everyone who has given of their time and expertise to reply. My feed is coming through CJ and so I'm gonna go for a programmer to code up a script that can do what I need - try and make it as unique and user-friendly as possible. Cheers
There are LOTS of good out-of-the-box and custom solutions out there already. Not sure why you would want a programmer. Webmerge is the most popular with affiliates that want to customize feeds to fit into their own site template. http://www.fourthworld.com/products/webmerge/index.html www.popshops.com is a VERY cool service. They have over 1,000 datafeed merchants, many of which are on CJ. http://www.popshops.com/merchants There are several others too... Hope this helps and best of luck!