Creating Data Feeds for eCommerce Affiliates

When you're working to build your online business, affiliate programs are a great tool. As well as your mainstream marketing campaigns, paying a revenue share to other sites in return for them promoting your products gives you a whole new sales team who'll work to spread the word about your store. There are a few pitfalls to be avoided though, and one of them is not providing enough support to your affiliates. One of the most powerful tools for helping your affiliates is a data feed, and remember that helping your affiliates also helps you. Here are a few tips for creating a great data stream to boost affiliate sales.

• Write good product descriptions: Affiliates will write their own product descriptions if they have to, but as you'll have to do it anyway for your own catalog, why not do a good enough job that they're happy to go with yours? As well as helping your affiliates, it also gives you a chance to promote your brand.
• Add good quality links – and then keep them up to date: If your links lead to your landing page, the wrong product or even a 404 error the customer isn't likely to hang around, and this cuts your affiliate's conversion rate (and your sales.) Make sure that every product's link leads right to the product page.
• Be flexible with images: Provide two images for every product, one full sized and one thumbnail. That covers all the bases and lets customers with mobile devices or slow connections get a good view of your products.
• Keep prices up to date: Few things put potential customers off than following a link that says $24.99 then landing on a product page that says $29.99. Right or wrong, it creates an impression of deceptive advertising. Online retailing depends on trust, and this doesn't build it. On the other hand, if you've cut prices or you're offering a special deal, out of date high prices will prevent customers from seeing it.
• Trim your feed: If you offer products with multiple options, you probably have a separate product record for each. Keep this out of your feed, because it's a quick way to bloat it. The affiliates will probably have to trim it manually, and this isn't going to endear you to them.
• Don't feed out of stock lines: If customers click on a product then land on a page that says sold out, they've wasted their time; that's not going to help the reputation of you or your affiliates. Use your ecommerce templates feed building tools to exclude anything where the stock value is zero.
• Use unique product IDs: This makes life easy for your affiliates, because they often use them to manipulate the feed to suit their own site. Without unique IDs, it's hard to track products between feed updates.

The key to a successful affiliate program is to make it one that people want to take part in. The less effort required, and the more sales generated, the happier your affiliates will be. A good data feed makes a big contribution to that aim, so make sure yours ticks the boxes above.

Posted in: ECommerce