Affiliate feed question

[Rooftop]

Does anyone know a tool for pulling and combining affiliate feeds from the main UK networks?

Just stumbled over an old site that we've ignored for a few  years, but seems to be picking up some worthwhile traffic.  The site has write ups of a number of products.  We used to have a home-grown system that pulled feeds from various networks, put them in a common database and allowed us to search them for matching products.  Looks like that system has died a death somewhere along the line due to either code incompatibilities or changes in feed formats.

Was looking at fixing it, but thought that there must be a tool out there that does this - or similar.  Any pointers?

[jetboy]

Very interested to hear any answers to this. Altova's MapForce is the closest I've found (http://www.altova.com/mapforce.html). However, if I were to try and do this, I'd be reading up on the Adapter design pattern, and attempting to produce a nice modular OO importing system.

[Drastic]

At drcool's recommendation I bought csvpig and it's a slick tool, worth checking out.

I tried datafeedr about 2 years ago and wasn't impressed for the price. I'm sure it's been improved and I don't remember exactly what I was working with, which may have influenced my decision to can it.

[Rooftop]

Interesting links, but not really where we are at.

I know that the next revelation will bring on a WTF from some here, but it's a bespoke coded site with unique, quality hand-written content (how old school!).  Not just looking to pull feed and publish on to a WP site for this.  We just want something that allows us to treet feeds from Awin, tradedoubler, cj, por, webgains etc etc as equals and search across a common database for matches.

Our original script was designed to power niche price comparison sites: Manually create the product then search the feeds for matches.  After product creation everything was on full-auto.

Could fix/ re-write. However I thought that this sort of this would be common-place by now. 

[PaulH]

We just want something that allows us to treet feeds from Awin, tradedoubler, cj, por, webgains etc etc as equals and search across a common database for matches.

Our original script was designed to power niche price comparison sites: Manually create the product then search the feeds for matches.  After product creation everything was on full-auto.

Could fix/ re-write. However I thought that this sort of this would be common-place by now. 

Last time i looked was about 12 months ago, but have never seen anything that can do this to even a mediocre level.

• Matching is awful and very basic
• Scripts fall over with volume of data
• Rubbish at filtering out accessories related to the product searched for

Importing the feed is easy, always found the matching to be the tricky part. At some point someone has to map the categories and products, and create all the filters.  Long time ago i remember reading pricerunner spent 2 years doing this.

[Rooftop]

Wow.  Seems that the affiliate side of the business hasn't really moved on much.

We spent about a month putting something together back in 2006.  Not massively complex, but allowed cross network searching on products based on numerous fields.  Each site we took it on required a little tweaking, but it worked.  In fact it it still driving small amounts of revenue today - despite being ignored totally for at least 3 years! 

It's broken in that it doesn't appear to update most of the feeds any more. Suspect that is changes on the networks part.  Looks like we might be recoding this then!

Thanks for the input though everyone.  Happy just to know I wasn't missing something.

[Drastic]

Yeah there are people doing this, you just can't get it off the shelf afaik. Custom code is the way to go.

[keano]

Presume you've had a look at this before - http://www.pricetapestry.com/ (just thought I'd mention anyway).

There are a fair few hacks for the script in their forum. Maybe of some use or give you some ideas...

[4Eyes]

I used PriceTapestry about 3 years ago - it seemed to work pretty well - not that I was over-taxing it though.

I just checked one of the sites I built with it and then forgot about - notwithstanding that fact that many of the aff feeds are dead now, those that are still alive seem to have still updated Ok - not bad given that I haven't touched it for a few years

[Rooftop]

Sometimes I regret the way I treated my brain in the 90s and wish I had a better memory. Price Tapestry: Yes, had seen it before, but had totally fogotten about it!  Excellent - thanks.  Just the sort of thing I was looking for.

At £200 it's definitely better than developing as well!

[Rooftop]

OK - that's two promising options.  I'll give both a go and see where we get.

We've basically been auditing our collection of sites and looking at any that have been ignored, but still have traffic.  Bit of house keeping should help the bottom line quite a bit.

[edo]

I've been using Datafeedr for the past year and while it has its limitations it's also a pretty powerful product. They rolled out a new version earlier this year so there's a lot more stuff you can do these days. Just make sure you put a lot of effort into setting up negative keywords to keep the feed pure. There is no non time-consuming, easy way around this sadly and I noticed Price Tapestry's demo page for cameras was full of irrelevant sh*t.

Ed

[jimbanks]

We've basically been auditing our collection of sites and looking at any that have been ignored, but still have traffic.  Bit of house keeping should help the bottom line quite a bit.

I'd be interested to know how many others have got the same situation where their monetisation and ancillary revenue has been forgotten/ignored/neglected?

I'm gathering thoughts on a business around that very thing. I see so many sites where they slap adsense up and that is it, no mobile monetisation, no rss feed monetisation, no email data capture with autoresponder follow up, no CPA, no per country offers, no ad serving. I guess a few hundred bucks from Google and they think they have done well.

To bring my thoughts back on topic, the one downside of pulling datafeeds together is they all use different naming conventions and some of the merchants should be shot for even calling what they have a datafeed, so pulling them all together requires a fair bit of dexterity on the mapping.

[Drastic]

>I'd be interested to know how many others have got the same situation where their monetisation and ancillary revenue has been forgotten/ignored/neglected?

I've always got a handful of sites that need to be reviewed. They're always somewhere on a list (todo) and I usually get around to them, but maybe a year or more late. Something to help with this would be incredibly beneficial.