Hi: Does anybody know approximately how often, on average, merchants update CJ with new deals, pricing, products, etc.? I'm building a web site that will drive purchases via numerous affiliate programs. Thus, instead of querying each affilitate program real-time, I plan to have a job that queries on a schedule to download merchant data to a local dB, then provide local search results on my site. Eventually user will link to merchant site to check-out/purchase. Have anyone done this before w/CJ? Thank you.
To be honest it widely varies. Some vendors have not updated their offers or advertisements in over a year, some update their deals on a daily basis and some on a weekly basis. The vendors that almost never update their advertisements usually don't make up most of the network earnings. With this being said most advertisers spend a lot of time trying to find the "perfect" banner, text links etc. Once they make one that has a high EPC they tend to stick with it until that advertisement just doesn't convert well anymore and they make new ones. As for "deals" many advertisers have weekly, if not daily deals...meaning they have "deals" updated either daily or weekly. When this is the case, they usually make your life easier and create an RSS feed that updates itself with "todays" or "this weeks" current deals. If you have advertisers like this it would be best to just write a script to look and process the RSS feed given to you (it already has your AID in all the links) and re-arrange the data or add it to your database as needed. Using the script + their RSS feeds for daily/weekly updates would save you time and the money it would take for you to pay someone to manually do it for you.
I run a price comparison website and it ranges from daily to almost never. Not only do prices changes but so do new product additions.