Flexible Content Managment System for Receiving Merchant Data Feeds

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Flexible Content Managment System for Receiving Merchant Data Feeds

Best Off the Shelf Solution for Accepting Daily Data Feeds from Merchants

Jonm35

5:24 am on Jan 12, 2009 (gmt 0)

Hello All,

I'm interested in becoming an affiliate publisher for a merchant with a large and complex product offering featuring 2500 products across around 120 brands.

I have some good experience in marketing websites but no experience in building an ecommerce site.

It seems to me the only way that I could handle such a large and changing inventory is via a datafeed. The merchant has offered me a csv datafeed that updates daily to a specific URL.

Can anyone recommend any good off the shelf content managment systems (actually, hosted is probabaly my preference) that would be easy to customise around a specific format of data feed?

I have no previous database experience but can work in HTML.

Thanks,

Jon

QiSoftware

5:19 pm on Feb 21, 2009 (gmt 0)

I thought this service pretty impressive:
[ashopcommerce.com...]

Regina Thomas

[edited by: tedster at 5:55 pm (utc) on Feb. 21, 2009]
[edit reason] removed extended signature [/edit]

Marcia

6:06 pm on Feb 21, 2009 (gmt 0)

Jon, I believe there's a feed specific product under development (it'll cost), but there are open source solutions available. I can't recall the name off-hand, but there's one a friend uses that's derived from osCommerce (FREE) and handles feeds from all the networks.

The downside is that if your content is the same feed that other publishers are using (hundreds/thousands), the pages will not be indexed by Google or Yahoo - which is exactly what happened to this friend who has NO original content on the site - just what's in the feeds. All his sites are banned by Google and Yahoo. And he's not the only one; feeds present a duplicate problem that gets sites filtered.

Research your keywords, create some value and original content, and then look for a solution that can avoid duplicate content issues.

Just MHO, FWIW.

Jonm35

11:37 pm on Feb 22, 2009 (gmt 0)

Thanks for the tip, Regina. I'll check it out.

Marcia - thanks for the thorough advice!

Marcia

12:10 am on Feb 23, 2009 (gmt 0)

Jon, you don't need a shopping cart, and most carts don't have capability of importing datafeeds, many of which update often - often daily, like Google Network. Then you're dealing with categorizing them - not really easy with some. You don't want out-dated info or prices or dead links, so to use a lot of feeds can take an automated solution (aka programming).

If you can't program or don't want to pay for a programmer, you might want to check out Popshops or Goldencan.