Tutorial 3 – Importing Data Feeds

In order to promote others products and earn commissions from subsequent sales, you will need to enter into an agreement with a Merchant Network. The Merchant Networks act as intermediaries to provide the necessary links to track (a) who introduced the buyer (and is eligible for commission) and (b) the value of the basket and therefore the commission..

Different merchants and occasionally even different product ranges will carry different commission rates. You may choose to use this information to decide which products you wish to promote.

Some merchants will even offer a 2nd Tier commission where you recruit new affiliates to the network. In that scenario, although the person leading the sale receives their full commission, and the person who introduced them also receives a small commission on the sale too.

If you haven’t already signed up to a merchant network, you need to do it before you can progress to the next level of the Affilistore configuration. Here are a few that I would characterise as the leading UK Networks.

OK. Presuming that you have already signed up to a Network, you need to find merchants and apply for their programme. In order for this exercise to proceed without delay, I have already applied in advance for a number matching my desired niche.

I am going to demonstrate using Affiliate Window for no other reason than they happen to be my favourite network and they have products to match.

Having signed up to the merchants, look for the datafeed (don’t confuse with deeplink) option

Search for datafeed option

On the next screen you will see a list of the subscribed merchants with a merchant ID number on the extreme left and the number of catalogue items to the right. Of course, this screen and the available information will vary by merchant. If in any doubt how to access the data, contact your merchant network or look for their own help screens.

Locating merchant ID parameter

Beneath the list of merchants, you will see the generic download URL that can be adapted for your purposes, looking like this:

http://datafeeds.productserve.com/datafeed_products.php?user=[your own account id]&password=[yourpassword]&mid=[1,3,...n]&format=[CSV|XML]&compression=zip&delimiter=[COMMA|PIPE|TAB]&dtd=[1.0|1.2]

It does look like a daunting URL, but we can simplify it somewhat – (a) your own user id and password are already embedded, (b) you need CSV format, (c) no compression (d) any of comma, pipe or tab delimiting are supported by Affilistore and (e) the dtd parameter [datafeed version] is immaterial.

The &mid parameter is the merchant id that you wish to download.

The required URL therefore looks like this (id and password are false ones for security reasons):

http://datafeeds.productserve.com/datafeed_products.php?user=76526&password=0eea71e1bc4582fc188eaac47dcab123&mid=350&format=CSV&delimiter=COMMA

You will often get a choice over the character that delimits the individual data fields (e.g comma, pipe ”|’ or tab); I have stuck with comma without issues. However, NEVER EVER choose the zip or compressed options as Affilistore will not manage those files.

Affiliate Window TIP: Save the newly constructed URL to a .txt file on your desktop. Then it is ready for you to substitute a new mid number when you need to upload a new merchants data feed. With Affiliate Window as demonstrated here and most networks, the URL will be persistent i.e. valid for all future downloads.

Visit the merchant page on your network to locate a small logo and save it with a meaningful name to your hard disk. You can then upload it to Affilistore as part of the upload process later.

If you paste the feed link above into a browser, you can manually download the data feed file. This is not always necessary unless you wish to perform manipulation on the file before uploading. Whilst I will discuss manually uploading a local file later, we will focus on loading a data feed via a direct URL.

To generate a datafeed URL from Webgains, use the following steps :

First, make sure that you use the Datafeed URL Generator – don’t mix up with any other option. Select the following options
Format:csv
Compression:none
Vendor:pick the one
Categories:all
Fields : I find standard normally good enough, but you may want to try the extended to get more fields (e.g. Brand is not available in the standard feed)
Tags: I usually leave them unchecked
Username: your webgains login name
Password: your webgains password
Check for changes: DO NOT CHECK

Then you will see the URL that you need to copy/paste and upload

So here goes …. let’s load our own first feed to our Affilistore site. Navigate to Admin and select the “Manage Feeds Option” and you will see the following screen:

Configuring a feed in Affilistore

Now enter the URL you created in the field above the “Add URL Feed” button. Be careful which feed type you select; in particular it should match the download separator that you requested in your URL. Then hit the “Add URL Product Feed” button to move to the next screen below where I show the mapping required for an Affiliate Window data feed:

Mapping a Datafeed to Affilistore

Two optional fields have been completed here. First of all, we opted to attach the logo that we downloaded earlier to our hard disk. Secondly, we are adding an additional parameter after the deeplink URL. In Affiliate Window’s case, they allow us to attach a clickref parameter after the product deeplink. Any clicks for this merchant will have this parameter tracked and is useful if you are selling products from the same merchant on multiple sites, allowing you to see which site is generating sales. In other circumstances you may need to add a prefix (before the URL) in order to be attributed clicks and sales. Affilistore also supports that model.

So, without any more ado, let’s press the “Add Product Feed” button and get our products onsite. If everything works OK, then Affilistore will deliver a confirmation message.

Affilistore confirmation that feed is loaded

Now go your website. It doesn’t look any different does it? Still no products on the front page and still our holding text. Well ….. that’s exactly what we expect right now because we turned everything off. However if you do a product search for a keyword that you expect to find, you will start to see the store taking shape as below:

Affilistore product listing

Well that concludes this lesson on basic datafeed uploads and is the next step towards a comprehensive Affilistore user manual. Keep watching the Affiliate Stores Blog for more tips, tricks and Affilistore tutorials.

We will return to datafeeds to discuss manual uploads (rather than direct URL upload) and to also discuss the options available to refresh the feeds and keep your product feeds and prices current.

I hope that you found this tutorial useful. Please your feedback comments.