Datafeed Studio – Guest Review

Datafeed Studio is a little bit more fussy with its requirements requiring a Unix/Linux and Apache environment with the MySQLi libraries enabled.

Unfortunately neither of my own hosting arrangements provided for the MySQLi libraries and I put out a call for a guest reviewer and my calls have been answered by Rich Fenner who writes as follows:

  

I can’t remember how I came across datafeed studio recently (it might well have been from this very blog!), but having done so I’m very happy and I thought my mini review of the trial version might be of interest to you readers of affiliate-stores.co.uk.

Before I found datafeed studio I was trying to hack around an off the shelf e-commerce tool which was both too bulky and couldn’t even do what I wanted, so when I found this tool, I did a bit of research and just tried it out.

There isn’t much info on this tool yet – maybe that gives those who do know about it first mover advantage or maybe it means we’re fools! I saw Datafeed studio had a trial version, so I thought I’d give it a go and once i’d sorted out the installation (which wasn’t that difficult, I just always seem to make it so!) on a subfolder of a domain I have, stuck in a couple of datafeeds and had it working almost straight away!

When I looked into the tool initially, it seemed there was a guy having problems with the installation and the reading of datafeeds, but that was over a couple of million products, and in my mind the way to think about this product is (as quite often in affiliate marketing), “niche”. Don’t get ideas that you are going to take on kelkoo, price runner et all. Even if this tool can do that it doesn’t feel like the right implementation of it to my mind.

The best way to get started is to stick in a couple of feeds (that’s all that is allowed on the trial version) and try out the various options available. You’ll soon find things you want to change in terms of what is being shown when the files are queried, but things are relatively easy to find and files are easily editable to pull through different parts of a datafeed, even for someone not that proficient in the technical side of things like me!

I grabbed an html template I use elsewhere as the basis for the look of the site once I’d got the pages to show the data I wanted. To be honest, the site looks ugly in standard form and you will need to make changes, but who cares – it means you have to fix it yourself and hopefully end up with a bespoke look in the process. I really like this as a starting point tool – its enough to get you working (I couldn’t this type of site up otherwise), yet I think you still need to put in a fair bit of effort to be happy with it which should stop a lot of similar looking sites. I’ve tried affilistore before and it was almost too easy to easy to set a site up without any effort, which almost devalues the sites which are worked on a lot. 

 

Is Datafeed studio worth the £79 being charged? Probably, since as I said I couldn’t do this otherwise. Yes, it isn’t the most polished piece of software in the world but does that really matter if it works? I’m sure there are a ton of changes people could request or even build in themselves if they were technically minded, but I think I’m happy enough to pay my money and give it a go.

The most recent version has included a CMS and blog function which is a good move forward as well. As to future enhancements, I’ve not really sat down and looked at too much more than what is currently available, but I’ll try to soon and let the developer know. And maybe I’ll return on this blog in a few weeks when I’ve bought and installed it on a proper domain so you can see what it does in action!

So, many thanks to Rich and I look forward to seeing Datafeed Studio being used in anger.