Hi
I'm new to Price Tapestry - a friend recommended it and I'm just getting started.
I've installed it at www.browseorbuy.co.uk/compare/ and uploaded two feeds - Currys and Comet from Affiliate Window.
The feeds are showing up but they seem really unreliable in terms of whether the merchant links will work, whether the pictures will show and so on.
I have an LCD TV review site and so I plan to link that to this site so is it possible to just take the LCD content from the feeds? Is the best way to strip it out before I upload the feed or to set a filter?
Also with TVs the product names often vary - is product mapping the best way around this or is there another solution to aid price comparison?
I would really appreciate some help getting set up, either free or via a consultant. Thanks,
Oliver
Thanks a lot David
I changed to the XML feeds and they seem to be working well!
I'll play around with the various tips you suggest re product mapping and category selection and I'll post again if I have further questions (I'm sure I will but for now I think I've got plenty to work with).
Cheers
Oliver
Hello Oliver,
It looks like you may be using the CSV version of the Affiliate Window feeds, which may have been auto-detected incorrectly, resulting in some products not being imported correctly. The XML feeds from Affiliate Window are much easier to use; so to start with I would recommend changing to the XML versions of the Curry's and Comet feeds, and then let me know if you're still having any problems registering and importing those.
There is a solution posted on the forum for only imported specific categories from a feed, which sounds like what you want to do for your LCD TV review site. The filter is called "Drop Record If Not (RegExp)", and you can find the code in the following thread:
http://www.pricetapestry.com/node/1551
Once you have limited the number of products being imported using this, you should then find that Product Mapping is the best way to match up products between merchants - even the big price comparison sites have to do this manually!
One tip with regards to making similar product names. It is not uncommon to find one merchant who has the brand and product name together as the product name, for example "Sony LCD1234", whereas another will have "LCD1234" as the product name and "Sony" in the brand field. If you come across this, Price Tapestry will let you combine the fields using the "Text Before" and "Text After" filters, with which you can use placeholders to bring in the value of other fields, for example %BRAND%. For more info on this see the following page:
http://www.pricetapestry.com/node/321
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
David.