FAQ – How often can you create and submit my affiliate program datafeed?

Posted on by Jamie Birch

Frequency is an important aspect of your product feed management.  Chloe Feed Assembler is set up to handle this in several different ways.  Our automagic scheduler and distribution tool allows you to set up daily, weekly and monthly recurring feed creation and distribution to the affiliate network of your choice.  Beyond that, you have the capability to create your feed at any time on the fly.  When would this be appropriate?

When you:

  • Experience heavy traffic days/weeks and your inventory fluctuates frequently necessitating updated feeds frequently
  • When you have a huge selection of new products show up in your inventory and you don’t want your product datafeed to be innacurate in between scheduled feeds

How do you decide on the proper frequency?  That is a great question.  It really depends on the nature of your product and your organization as a whole.  One of our clients is a big retailer in the fast fashion category.  Their inventory levels can change multiple times a day, so they have a daily recurring feed and we update it twice a day manually.  We have other clients that have the same product year in and year out, we update that one quarterly just to be safe.  I don’t recommend going more than a quarter, even in a case like this.  Most advertisers see that a weekly feed update schedule is suitable.  But if you are not sure, a weekly or daily cost the same, so try each out, test and measure the results.  We are a huge advocate of testing and measuring, so give it a shot.  But in the end, it really depends on your product turnover.

In the past, the frequency of the feed depended entirely on your IT team’s willingness to get it done and the affiliate manager’s time and resources.  But, with the Chloe Feed Assembler, that isn’t a consideration any longer.

Current Fields Gathered and Assembled into Product Data Feeds

Posted on by Jamie Birch

Many have asked us what type of information we gather directly from advertisers’ websites and assemble into affiliate program product datafeeds. Currently, we have focused on the required fields of networks like Rakuten LinkShare, CJ by Conversant, ShareASale, AvantLink, Impact Radius, Ebay Enterprise Affiliate Network, Affiliate Window etc. Those fields are:

  • Product Name
  • Product URL
  • Product Image
  • Product Thumbnail
  • Product Price
  • Long Description
  • Short Description
  • Keywords
  • Sizes
  • Color
  • Product Category
  • Product Subcategory
  • Product Grandchild Category
  • Other Configurable Product Attributes

What is a configurable product attribute?  A configurable product is simple, a product that you can configure :).  For example – apparel.  You can choose size, color and even style.  For other items you may choose size, weight, quality, thickness or other attributes by which you can change, customize and alter the product.  Chloe Feed Assembler grabs all of those.

We are working diligently on adding the following attributes to our feed crawl and export:

  • Manufacturer ID
  • Brand Name
  • Additional Thumbnail URLs
  • Product Reviews and Ratings
  • Sale Price vs Retail Price
  • Brand Logo Image
  • UPC code
  • Condition (New/Used)
  • Gender
  • Shipping options
  • European Article Number
  • Warranty Information
  • Currency
  • Author
  • Heel Heigth
  • Made_in
  • Material Composition
  • Shoe size
  • Show width
  • Complete Category Path
  • Savings Percent Sale vs. Retail
  • Global Trade Item Number
  • Shipping Costs
  • Related Products
  • Customers Who Bought X Also Bought

We are looking to add these attributes shortly, stay tuned!

 

infomercial_product

Scheduling your product datafeed creation and distribution – now easier than making a sandwich.

Posted on by Jamie Birch

Today we released an exciting new feature to our product datafeed creator – Chloe Feed Assembler – the Crawling and Distribution Scheduler! Do you wake up in the middle of the night wondering when you need to create your datafeed? Do you wake up in a cold sweat wondering if you submitted your product datafeed to your affiliate network? Do you have a recurring nightmare that you created your feed but forgot to submit it, like the one I have where I show up to high school without pants?

Well stress no more!

Now the Chloe Feed Assembler allows you to schedule the day and time you want to create your feed, how often you want it created (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly etc) and when to distribute it to your network(s) of choice. Yes you heard me right! Not only can we automagically create your feed whenever you want and do that every (enter time frame here), but we’ll also automagically submit it to the network of your choice!

You’ll wake up well rested and in a good mood when you read your email and see this: “Your feed was created, submitted and accepted today at 5:20am!”

Ok, enough of the late night informercial. But it’s true. The only thing it doesn’t do for you is cut a beer can in half and still thinly slice a tomato!

Need this? We thought so. Contact us at sales@chloeassembler.com or 1800-208-6215. We’d love to help you get started!

FAQ – Is there an interface to do the field mapping for my product datafeed?

Posted on by Jamie Birch

Yesterday I presented the full functioning Feed Assembler to a prominent network.  I really enjoyed showing our solution to a very common problem to a super smart group of people.  I love showcasing the Feed Assembler!  They asked me a few questions that I’ll be elaborating on here over the coming days and weeks.  The first one was a great one.  “Do you have an interface or a dashboard where the customer can or has to map their data to the feed specified fields required?

Great question right?  The simple answer is no, we don’t.  Could we?  Most definitely we can.  But why not now?

Well, we wanted to solve a specific problem with this tool.  Creating  feed when there are no tech resources or skills available to create one and make the results available any any network format.  I used myself 15 years ago as an example of the ideal client.  I was an affiliate manager at a very large women’s apparel retailer.  While I was handy in the tech area for a marketing guy, I was not a developer nor would I have been given access to that realm by the tech team.  The tech team also had hundreds of projects that were ahead of my datafeed requirements and it took me over a year to get a datafeed, and then I got one comprehensive feed, no customization or categorization of feeds.  I got what I got and that’s all I got.

I would have killed for a tool that allowed me to create a feed without any involvement from my entire company outside of submitting a payment option and providing credentials to upload and distribute the feed.  Ok, I don’t think I would have killed or even maimed, but I probably would have given good money for it.

So because of that, we didn’t want to provide an interface to do the mapping.  We wanted to do it for you.  So we do.  Clients of the Feed Assembler do not have to figure out what fields go where, what requirements each network has and what needs to go into those required areas.  We do that during the mapping process that takes a little over a day, share that first feed output with you the advertiser, then set up the crawl and distribution schedule.  After that you receive notification emails that the feed has started, it has completed, it was sent to the network(s) and it was accepted.  And then the receipt when it is done.

We tried to make this as simple as possible for you to have a fully functioning datafeed!

And I’m so excited to see you use it!