Anyone else encountered this? We have one site that pulls some data from affiliate networks as a side income.  One of the big merchants wants us to put canonical links to their 'product' pages wherever we use it.

They don't seem to get why we don't want to do it. (by "don't want to" I of course mean "are not going to").

My client encountered that. We (very nicely) told the merchant in question to go fly a kite.

If you're using the merchants descriptions out of the box without any enriching, it would be dupe content anyway and there you probably wouldn't loose anything by using a canonical?

Of course as an aff I'd try to out-rank them, but only by adding some more data to their feed.

However if they offer a feed, they should know the consequences

I think that the problem is that we outrank them.  I suspect it would not have been mentioned otherwise.

stupid question:

If the merchant is offering the feed, can't they just put the "canonical" tag in their feed?

http://th3core.com/talk/water-coolerextra/outranking-the-merchant/

I think now I would say bollocksto them.