Hi David
Heard quite a lot about your website pricetapestry, we are a small player in mobile industry and quite new to the concept of affiliate marketing.
How are we supposed to manage and update the data feed(particularly .csv feeds ) for every merchant on regular basis.
is it possible to do it automatically with the help of your software, what are the basic minimum technical know how required so as to manage all the feeds of different mobile merchants on different networks.
Can you please advice if its possible with the help of your software to mange all the latest deals along with the updation features and many more automatically.
Also can we do price comparison analysis or best deals analysis across the affiliate networks havinh number of mobile merchants.
cheers
nhv
Hi!
> How are we supposed to manage and update the data feed
> (particularly .csv feeds ) for every merchant on regular basis.
Price Tapestry includes a number of support scripts that help you to setup an automated process to download and import products into the database. This means that once you have added a new merchant and included their feed in your automation process you don't need to do anything else on going. There's lots of information in the following thread about automating Price Tapestry:
http://www.pricetapestry.com/node/198
> what are the basic minimum technical know how required so as to manage
> all the feeds of different mobile merchants on different networks.
The technical knowledge required for a basic Price Tapestry site is basic website administration. Installation is just a matter of editing the config file and uploading the files to your web hosting account, but you need to be able to create a MySQL database ready for Price Tapestry to use (your host should provide instructions for doing this). For a more complex setup, including the automation as described above you would ideally need to have access to your server vi Telnet or SSH; and be familiar with setting up CRON jobs in your hosting account. A CRON job lets you run commands on your server at pre-scheduled times.
> Also can we do price comparison analysis or best deals analysis
> across the affiliate networks havinh number of mobile merchants.
For a simple price comparison - yes; Price Tapestry treats them all as separate merchants - it doesn't matter which affiliate network the merchant / feed is from.
However....
Please note that Price Tapestry is geared around Product / Price. Mobile phone data feeds typically contain more information; such as a contract length; free minutes, free texts etc. If you are wanting to display this information in order for users to compare deals from the different merchants then i'm afraid it would take a fair bit of modification to achive. Some users have created mobile phone sites with Price Tapestry, but primarily just using the backend (admin and feed registration / importing) having added a few of their own fields and then writing their own front-end. To do that requires a certain level of PHP knowledge.
Something you might want to consider as an alternative to developing your own site is a script run by a member of the A4U forum...
http://www.a4uforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=42648
As far as I know, that script doesn't require any programming or installation on your part; you just configure it with your affiliate ID across the various networks and it does the rest...
Hope this helps,
Cheers,
David.