Comments on: Nearly 2008 & Product Feeds Are Still Pants!

By: Tipster

Tipster — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 20:12:52 +0000

It’s about time some of the merchants invested some of their huge profits in improving product feeds for affiliates. I’m an affiliate for Amazon UK and they have never updated the book cover images that are displayed on my site. Even though i know for a fact more up-to-date titles have been published.

By: John Jupp

John Jupp — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 22:37:14 +0000

I get seriously annoyed with the feeds at the moment. Some seriously bad advice is being given to AW merchants in respect of what each category should be called. When AW then permitted direct merchant categorisation I thought “great, no more rubbish category names”. How wrong I was. Cos AW went on to advise merchants what categories should be made available.

Now so many merchants have a single category or just a handful (irrespective of the network they are on), that I shall not be promoting over 70% of all merchants from the previous year.

By: Rob

Rob — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 17:15:57 +0000

A year ago I set up a site with the Evans Cycles feed from Affiliate Window, and it was very nicely categorised (mountain bikes, BMX, helmets, saddles etc) which made it easy to make a site. A Â£1500 bike order came through the other day and I thought to myself “right, that old bike site of mine deserves some attention”, so I got an updated feed and in place of the helpful categories, there was now just two categories: “Cycling” and blank.

Their product feed from a year was far better to their current one. That’s the opposite of progress and kind of annoying.

That’s just one example – it would be very easy to make up a list of product feed disasters, so this is a great post to flag up such a weak area in affiliate marketing. Looking at the mess some product feeds are, I can only imagine they’ve been put together by people who don’t know how affiliates actually use them.