What Is Product Feed and Why Is It Helpful?

What is a Product Feed?

A great way for an advertiser to share thousands of products with affiliates, comparison shopping sites, and marketplaces is to provide them with an affiliate data feed. This feed is a file containing specific information about their products and where to find them on their website.

Why are Product Feeds helpful?

Setting up an XML feed for affiliates saves the advertiser a massive amount of time by linking to all the included products in their store and containing all the products in one offer instead of potentially thousands of different offers.

Product Feed Format:

Having the feed of data return in an XML format provides a universal, easy to parse solution for affiliates to pull the data from the advertiser and display them on their own sites, and appending affiliate tracking links to the product pages provided in the feed.

  1. Json
  2. xml
  3. rss
  4. csv

Mandatory Fields to prompt from the Advertisers:

1. Mandatory – developers can’t develop and implement product feeds into the system if these fields aren’t present

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List of Google Product Category: taxonomy-with-ids.en-US.xls

2. Highly recommended – best case for developers and from a technical standpoint, if advertisers give these fields too

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3. Ideal – ideal if advertisers could send all these information too

ideal.png

Sample URL of a Product Feed:

http://myadvertiserstore.com/product-feed

Product Feed example:

When you visit this URL, you can view the feed in your browser. Here is an example of what the feed data can look like:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Products>
  <Product>
    <Name>Soft Duvet Set</Name>
    <Description>Seriously soft, gets softer with each wash. Made of 100% cotton. Signature 2" flange.</Description>
    <Price>$139.00</Price>
    <URL>http://thebeddingstore.com/product/392487-Soft-Duvet-Set</URL>
  </Product>
  <Product>
    <Name>Stripe Sheet Set</Name>
    <Description>The single pick construction and washing process produces a fabric that gets softer with each wash. Features embroidered stripes</Description>
    <Price>$95.00</Price>
    <URL>http://thebeddingstore.com/product/987234-Stripe-Sheet-Set</URL>
  </Product>
  <Product>
    <Name>Linen Decorative Pillow</Name>
    <Description>100% linen square pillow. Polyester fill insert included.</Description>
    <Price>$35.00</Price>
    <URL>http://thebeddingstore.com/product/725284-Linen-Decorative-Pillow</URL>
  </Product>
</Products>

Deeplink Enable for XML Feed

Before you start adding the XML feed into your DCMnetwork account, you need to enable Deeplink in the offer. This will allow the tracking link to append a custom URL in which it sends the traffic to. Because each product has a different URL, this feature MUST be enabled for the XML feed to work.