Uploading feeds

Hi Martin,

Welcome to the forum!

The feeds (either CSV or XML) generally come from Affiliate Networks - they are most often referred to as "affiliate datafeeds". The affiliate networks are 3rd party companies who sit between you and the merchants; meaning you don't require any commercial relationship with the merchants you put on your site - your own relationship is with the affiliate networks.

Some of the networks to get started with, depending on where you're based and what country you are looking to target are

UK - Affiliate Window
UK - TradeDoubler (also most EU countries)
US - ShareASale.com

...but there are many, many more (search "affiliate network" on your favourite search engine). When joining a network, search their help information or suppot forums to make sure that feeds are available; and after joining there would normally be an area of your affiliate administration control panel where you can download the feeds for the merchants you have subscribed to.

Downloading the feeds to your computer and then uploading them (with your FTP program) to the /feeds/ folder of your Price Tapestry installation is the easiest way to get started if you're new to feeds; but once you become more familiar you could start to use the Autmation Tool which fetches feeds by URL automatically rather than you having to manually download / upload feeds...

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
David.
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PriceTapestry.com

Hi David,

thanks for the welcome.

Unfortunately the websites involved do not belong to any affiliate system and will never likely to be. They are diving schools and so sell their services direct through their own websites. What can I do to get the data from each individual website and then have Price Tapestry compare it?

Thanks all, Martin

Hi Martin,

If you have a close relationship with the schools you could ask if they might send you a spreadsheet with details of their courses / offers; but being very niche it may be feasible for you to create the feed manually.

Whilst you can always create a .csv file manually with any text editor; it's probably easiest to use a spreadsheet program, e.g. Microsoft Excel, or the free OpenOffice.org Calc. I normally recommended keeping your master copy in the spreadsheet's native format, but when you wish to update use the File > Export function to save the spreadsheet as a CSV file. The default CSV export options of both Microsoft Excel and OpenOffice.org Calc will create a .csv file that is compatible with Price Tapestry.

In terms of maintaining your spreadsheet, start by creating a header row in row A with the following fields

Merchant|ProductName|Description|ImageURL|BuyURL|Price|Category|Brand

(where | is just being used to represent the columns in your spreadsheet)

Of those, since Price Tapestry supports multiple merchants in the same feed, only Merchant, ProductName, BuyURL and Price are mandatory - so you don't necessarily need all columns)

You would then enter product information one item per row; making sure that Merchant + ProductName is unique, but where you want products to be compared between merchants making sure to use an identical ProductName....

Cheers,
David.
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PriceTapestry.com

OK

that is clear

Thanks all, Martin