e-business

Product Datafeeds that sell

If you are an e-retail merchant with an affiliate program or an affiliate who promotes online retailers, you probably already use datafeeds to drive targeted traffic and sales to your business.

Over the past few years, datafeeds have become a very important sales channel for online merchants and affiliates.

Affililates use these tab (or comma or pipe) delimited text files to fill up their websites with products from merchants they promote. While the more technically inclined affiliates parse datafeeds with their own scripts, even relatively non-techie affiliates make good use of datafeeds using applications such as Webmerge. It is essential for merchants to provide affiliates with what I am going call a “Good Datafeed” for them to be able to make the fullest use of it as what can literally be a sales manufacturing machine.

I started a discussion thread on AbestWeb to find out what, according to affiliates, should and should not be in a good datafeed, and here are some tips on how to offer the right datafeed solution :

• Update your datafeeds at least once a week – It is important to keep your datafeed filled with all the current product and inventory data, clicks to product links that say “Sorry, but this item is currently out of stock” are not going to lead to a sale but only to many irritated people who could have been your customers. Out of stock data in your feeds will result in a lower EPC for you and your affiliate.
• Keep it clean – Datafeeds are plain text files, and should be treated that way. When you generate a product datasheet from your shopping cart, it will at on many occasions convert special characters into unicode characters; for instance, a space becomes %20, but when affiliates parse your datafeed, they will have to first re-convert these characters into humanly readable signs. It is very important to clean up your datafeeds before distributing them. It’s also a good idea to avoid HTML code in product descriptions.
• Absolutely don’t include your telephone number or direct links to places on your website in product descriptions. clicks on these links can’t be tracked by the affiliate tracking software and most affiliates will never use such a datafeed – some ignorant affiliates may, but they are not the ones who bring revenue.
• Include as much product data as you can – ISBN numbers, UPC codes, manufacturer’s codes, brand name, estimated time it will take to ship, product sizes and colors available, everything else that is relevant.
• Categorize – If you are a gift shop, for example, don’t just type “Gifts” in the category field, Categorize your feed with categories from your store, with a main category and upto a minimum of one and maximum of two child categories per product

…That’s the basic stuff, but there are many more network and merchant specific tips still being posted on the AbestWeb thread here

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© 2007 Final Tag.