What Is An Affiliate Datafeed Or Product Feed?
An online store that has products will create a file with a list of all of their products and this is called an affiliate datafeed.
The datafeed usually contains information like product titles, descriptions, price, availablity, url of picture, and more.
As an affiliate you can find find your affiliate link in the product feed or you can modify the product url they give you to include your tracking information. If you are unsure about your affiliate link you find in the datafeed then contact the online store.
Why Use An Affiliate Datafeed?
If you want to send traffic to an online store you will need to know information about their products. You might need to know the names of products to get keywords to bid on to drive traffic. You might make web pages with the information in the datafeed. You could make a cool comparison or product discovery tool.
Before you do anything you need the merchant's product information and a datafeed is how they give the information to affiliates.
Where to get Affiliate Datafeeds
Most affiliate companies like shareasale.com, cj.com, linkshare.com and more have product feeds for you to download. Unfortunately there is no standard so you will need to contact your affiliat company for specifics on how to get the datafeed.
What is the difference between a Datafeed and an API?
A datafeed is a file that you download with all of the information from a merchant.
An API is a way for a program to grab only specific items from a merchant.
If you want a mass dump of data from a merchant, or have little technical and programming skills then you might prefer a datafeed.
If you are a programmer you should look into the API if available.
How do I build a website with data from an affiliate datafeed?
There are many programs on the market that can help you build a website. You can also manually copy and paste the data into posts on a blog or website however this is not recommended.
How do I open an affiliate datafeed?
Affiliate datafeeds can be opened with a text editor or a spreadsheet program like open office calc or microsoft excel. I prefer to use a spreadsheet over a text editor because a spreadsheet will keep all of you data in neater columns.