what makes a good data feed? tips for merchants - updated presentation (2014)

What Makes a Good Data Feed? Tips for MerchantsJan 28 -29, 2009

Internet Marketing Resources Portal

What Makes a Good Affiliate Product Data Feed?

Tips for Merchants (updated April 2014)

Presented by Carsten Cumbrowski

•Each type of affiliate has different needs and requirements to be able to leverage your

product feed and integrate it into their web sites.

•What are those different types, what are their individual needs and why?

•Technical best practices and specific actionable tips for how you can make your data

feed easily accessible and to work with.

•How to make them work across different platforms to avoid losing big chunks of affiliates

for mere technical reasons.

The ingredients for a data feed that is actually useful for your affiliates.

This presentation is also available at:Slideshare.net/Cumbrowski.com

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Carsten Cumbrowski - Short Intro

• Born in (East) Berlin/Germany

• Came to the United States in May 2000

• Affiliate marketer since early 2001

• Affiliate manager for BevMo.com 2002-2006 (via CJ)

• Operated a price-comparison site for several years, where I worked with

hundreds of product data feeds; from networks and custom

• Blogger at ReveNews.com and SearchEngineJournal.com

• Marketing resources collection at Cumbrowski.com

especially http://www.Cumbrowski.com/datafeeds

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http://www.cumbrowski.com/datafeeds



The 2 Part Structure of this Presentation

Part I : The use of Data Feeds and their Content

Part II: Technical Tips to Format, Deliverability and Structure

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Feed Affiliates are Made EqualFeed Affiliates are NOT Made Equal

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Types of Feed Affiliates (Generalization)

1. Price Comparison Sites

2. Niche Directories

3. Coupon Affiliates/Price Drops

4. Content Affiliates/Specialty Sites

5. Bloggers

Should not use raw product data feeds,

but sometimes do, due to the lag of alternatives

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Content Affiliates/Bloggers

Should not use raw product data feeds!!!

Provide tools that are based on product feeds!

1.Widgets/Gadgets

2.Product Show-Case Creators

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Content Affiliates/Bloggers

Use 3rd Party Providers and/or Custom and/or Networks

Provide tools that are based on product feeds.

1.Widgets/Gadgets

2.Product Show-Case Creators

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Types of Feed Affiliates (Generalized & Simplified)

1.Price Comparison Sites

2.Niche Directories

3.Coupon Affiliates/Price Drops

4.3rd Party Tools Providers

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Examples: Price Comparison Site

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Examples: Price Drop/Coupon Site

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Examples: Niche Directory

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Examples: Content Site (Widgets)

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Everybody Likes

•Unique Identifier of Product within Feed(s)

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1. Price Comparison Affiliates like...Information to match & group identical products from multiple merchants

1. BAR Code Information

oEAN / EAN-13

oUPC-A / UPC-C

oISBN / ISBN-13 (“Bookland”)

and/or

2. Manufacturer Part # / Manufacturer Name

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1. Price Comparison Affiliates also like...

•Info to determine/estimate FINAL purchase price

oShipping Cost

oPackaging and other Surcharges

oTax Information

•Usually smaller product images/thumbnails preferred

•Detailed Description is often appreciated to build info

page for “master product”

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2. Coupon Affiliates / ”Price Drops” like...

•Start/End Date/Time for “on-Sale” Price, if available

•“Regular-Price” is used for MSRP (SRP or RRP) ?

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ALLWAYS!

MSRP Problem Illustration

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category*

3. Niche Directories like...

1

* Consolidate products, which are assigned to sub-categories with only a single product attached to them, 1 level “up”

product 1

provide Product Categorizations that make sense

“lump” thousands of products into ONE category ...

DO!

DON’T!

-OR-

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Categorization Problems Illustration

1.

2. 3.

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NOW LET’S TALK TECH!NOW LET’S TALK TECH!

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Basic Elements of a Product Data Feed

1.Format

1.1 Column Delimiter

1.2 Row Delimiter

1.3 Escaping of Special Characters/String Formatting

1.4 Headers/no Headers

2. Structure

2.1 Column Names, Order, Types and Defaults

3. Delivery Methods/Access to Feed

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1.There is NO Right Format or Delivery Method!

2. Provide as many Options as Possible!

3. Let each Affiliate Choose for Itself!

In Simple Terms: ...

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Document it! Affiliates are NO Fortune Tellers!

Knowing is ALWAYS better than Assuming!

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Whatever you do is entirely your choice and should be

controlled by business sense and economics.

Most Affiliates can work with what you got, if you provide Documentation.

One Exception! It must be possible to Access and Process

your Feeds without any human interaction! That means:

1.No Login Forms to fill out

2.No Messages that must be acknowledged

3.No Choices that must be made manually every time

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There are many options to provide automated access to

current feeds. Here are some examples:

1. HTTP Access with settings and account credentials as URL Parameter.

For security reasons I recommend the use of SSL for those (https://…)

e.g. https://merchant.com/aff/datafeed/?aid=12345&pw=MYPW&opt1=...

2. Access to pre-generated feed-files via FTP Server

3. Web-Service using SOAP or REST etc.

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Canon - PowerShot 10.0-Megapixel Digital ELPH Camera – Silver

SKU: 8800577

http://.../images/products/8800/8800577_sc.jpg

http://.../images/products/8800/8800577_sb.jpg

http://.../images/products/8800/8800577_sa.jpg

Thumbnail Images (Product Listing)

Medium Size Image (Product Detail)

Large Image (Pop-Up)

The Power of “Know” - A Practical Example

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Sony - Cyber-shot 10.1-Megapixel Digital Camera - Green

SKU: 8943129

Guess the URLs to the different sized product images for this item!

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http://.../images/products/8943/ 8943129_ra.jpg

http://.../images/products/8943/ 8943129_rb.jpg

http://.../images/products/8943/ 8943129_rc.jpg

Sony - Cyber-shot 10.1-Megapixel Digital Camera - Green

SKU: 8943129

http://.../images/products/8943/ 8943129_sc.jpg

http://.../images/products/8943/ 8943129_sb.jpg

http://.../images/products/8943/ 8943129_sa.jpg

Thumbnail Images (Product Listing)

Medium Size Image (Product Detail)

Large Image (Pop-Up)

Correct?Oops!Why r and not s ? I have no Idea!

Let’s see the real URL’s

used by the Merchant

for this product.


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Now Some Specific Technical Tips...These tips are based on my own personal experience and talks with other

people who work with data feeds and both end of the process, including:

•Merchants

•Networks

•Third Party Vendors

•Other Affiliates, including “competitors”

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Product Data Feeds - Technical Tip: #1

Column Delimiter: TAB character (ASCII character code 9)

● Feed content is used in almost every case for the use on the Internet and thus rendered in HTML.

● HTML does not have a TAB character or an equivalent for it.

● Any TAB character in content of your product catalog should be replaced with something appropriate.

You probably do this already on your own website, where you have the same problem.

● Ask your webmaster what they do for your site! There might be no TAB characters left in your data

anymore, because they were all replaced with a fixed number of spaces.

● Whatever the case might be, do the same during the export of your feed and include this information

in your feed documentation for your affiliates.

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Row Delimiter: Line-Feed (ASCII character 10)

The format to indicate a new line in text files (line-break) varies between computer platforms.

I strongly recommend to let your affiliates specify the platform they are using to process your feeds, save it

with their account and generate feeds for them according to this setting.*

● Microsoft Windows (and MS DOS) uses the character combination of Carriage-Return

(CR, ASCII character 13) and Line-Feed (LF, ASCII character 10)

● Unix and Linux systems only use the Line-Feed character (LF, ASCII character 10)

● Macintosh uses only the Carriage-Return character (CR, ASCII character 13)

* If “choice” is NOT an option, use the Unix/Linux line-break option, because most Windows and

Macintosh DB applications are capable of handling the Unix line-break, but not the other way around.


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No special enclosure of text values, e.g. using double-quotes

There is no need for this special treatment, especially if you replaced all column and row delimiters that

appear in the content itself.

I did not have the space left in the previous slide, but I strongly suggest replacing any line-breaks that

appears in your content with something else and again include this information in your feed

documentation.

I suggest using <BR/> , which is the HTML tag to generate a line-break.

The advantage of doing this is obvious and publishers who do not like it can easily strip or replace it during

the import of your feed, if they want to.


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● Include Column header as the first Row within the feed.

● Do not use any special characters in the name, including spaces. Use only the characters:

a-z and/or A-Z, 0-9 and if you want to _ as a separator between words for better readability.

● Make the column titles as descriptive as possible, but also as short as possible.

● This is not a substitute for a written documentation of the feed structure. It only supports it, like a

reference card only supports a user manual, but not replaces it.

● Do not make the titles longer than 64 characters!

Use First Row in the Feed for Column Titles/Headers


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Transmitting Hierarchical Information

● You often want to relay hierarchical information within your two-dimensional data feed, for example a

product category structure.

● The semi-standard method of doing this is to include all parents of the node in the column data, which

contains the information about the node where the item is attached to in addition to the node itself.

● The individual levels are usually separated by the character “>”.

● The value starts with the top parent node in the root and ends with the node itself.

Example:

Item A is attached to sub-category Z.

Sub-category Z is a child node of Category Y, which is right below the root of the hierarchy.

The content for the category information of Item A would look like this:

Category Y>Sub-category Z


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Initialize cells with no values for the item properly

Numeric Values

● Usually 0, if there is no value.

● You can use the initial value to relay information about the format of the data in this

column, if you actually have data for an item.

● This is especially helpful, if only few items have a value for it or if the value is seasonal in

nature and not used all the time.

1. 0.000 Numeric values with up to 3 digits after the decimal point (e.G. weights)

2. 0.00 Numeric values with up to 2 digits after the digital point (e.G. price values)

3. 0.0 Numeric values with up to 1 digit (e.G. length, dimensions)

4. 0 Numeric values without digital point (e.G. counts, numbers)


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Initialize cells with no values for the item properly

Date/Time Values

● Often left empty if item has no value for this property. What is the format, if there Is a value?

● Is it just a date or only a time or date & time? U.S. date format, British? Maybe ISO xxxx or

something entirely different . Maybe even just text entered by a human with no rules (oh horror!).

● There are ways to let publishers know (in addition to spelling it out in the documentation of the

feed) via the initial values in the feed data.

Here are 3 Examples for some initial date/time values that can “talk” about the format for records that

do have real values to watch out for:

1. 01/31/1900

2. 31/01/50 12:00 AM

3. 19001231


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…

There are many more tips like this, but beyond the time limit and scope of this presentation.

I included the ones that I consider to be the most important ones and caused me at least the

most headaches and problems with the processing and use of merchants product data feeds.

There is much more.

See the resources recommendation at the end of my presentation.

… and more; and more… etc.

Product Data Feeds - Technical Tip: #7 1/2

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Recommended Data Feed Resources

Article

Merchant Product Data Feeds for Affiliates – 101

http://www.Cumbrowski.com/datafeeds101 and Slideshare.net/Cumbrowski.com

Collection of Resources

http://www.Cumbrowski.com/datafeeds

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http://www.Cumbrowski.com/datafeeds101







This Presentation is available at:

Slideshare.net/Cumbrowski.com

Carsten Cumbrowski

[email protected]

www.Cumbrowski.com/about

www.Cumbrowski.com/contact

Thank You!

Note: This Google Docs Version of this Presentation was optimized and enhanced in 2014.

Finished





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