If you would like to offer your Affiliates as much effective advertising material as possible for promoting your products and services, creating a product data feed should be a high priority. This will allow your Affiliates to display your products on their websites to potential buying customers with relative ease and this will typically increase your sales.
What is a data feed?
A data feed is simply a file that contains all the relevant information about your individual products such as their name, price, product purchase page URL, product image URL, description, category etc. A data feed is provided in .csv format which can be easily manipulated by using MS Excel and Notepad.
Why is that important?
Affiliates can take data feeds and manipulate them to be used on their websites in any way they want to. That means that they can display every product item, or every category or every price range etc. in any manner they wish to on their own websites. The options are limitless for Affiliates and therefore many are very interested in promoting Merchants who offer data feeds.
The following is an example SQL statement that creates a product data feed for Share A Sale. After you run the SQL statement you will need to export results to csv. In the SQL below, replace xxx and URL with your store information.
Share A Sale Data Feed Specification
SELECT
spv.Sku as SKU,
modelname as Name,
'https://URLTOINIVIDUALPRODUCT' + CAST(sp.[productid] as varchar(255)) + '/' + [seourl] + 'Default.aspx' as URL,
unitcost + PriceAdjustment as Price,
unitcost + PriceAdjustment as RetailPrice,
'https://xxxx.com/Portals/x/SmithCart/Images/' + [productimage] as [FullImage],
'https://xxxx.com/Portals/x/SmithCart/Images/' + [productimage] as [ThumbNailImage],
'' as Commission,
'xx' as Category,
'xxx' as SubCategory,
summary as [Description],
'' as SearchTerms,
'' as [Status],
'xxxxx' as MerchantId,
'' as Custom1,
'' as Custom2,
'' as Custom3,
'' as Custom4,
'' as Custom5,
manufacturer as Manufacturer,
'' as PartNumber,
'' as MerchantCategory,
'' as MerchantSubCategory,
'' as ShortDescription,
'' as ISBN,
'' as UPC,
'' as CrossSell,
'' as MerchantGroup,
'' as MerchantSubGroup,
'' as CompatibleWith,
'' as CompareTo,
'' as QuantityDiscount,
'' as BestSeller,
'' as AddToCartURL,
'' as ReviewsRSSURL,
'' as Option1,
'' as Option2,
'' as Option3,
'' as Option4,
'' as Option5,
'x' as ReservedForFutureUse1,
'' as ReservedForFutureUse2,
'' as ReservedForFutureUse3,
'' as ReservedForFutureUse4,
'' as ReservedForFutureUse5,
'' as ReservedForFutureUse6,
'' as ReservedForFutureUse7,
'' as ReservedForFutureUse8,
'' as ReservedForFutureUse9,
'' as ReservedForFutureUse10
FROM Smith_Products sp
inner join [Smith_ProductVariant] spv on sp.ProductID = spv.ProductID