Product Feeds ( Advice )

[Eddie Stone]

I've been tasked to produce some system wherby affiliates can display our
products on their website. At the moment affiliates are simply mirroring
the site and there is no organisation.

I said I could improve on this and add a consistent, convenient system for
supplying the latest products to our affiliates. Little did I know that
they'd go for it !

I have several options I think

1. Rss Feeds ( I dont think it is flexible enough to support all the
elements of our products )

2. Web Service ( No problem but I think it may be bridge to far for some
affiliates )

3. Some kind of javascript thingy like google Ad sense.

If there is anyone reading who has experience with a similar project I
would greatful for some advice.

TIA;

 

[Alex Passos]

Well you can do it like (cough cough) Amazon does where you plug in a little
code in your web page and it pulls in the product layouts. Ideally XML
would be great to feed the products out. I have seen some of the larger
vendors like TechData running dedicated XML servers where they provide all
product attributes, including latest pricing based on a request-response
model. Some people cache the product data on their databases and just
update the prices.

I think to be the most flexible if possible for you to offer both solutions.
But you will want to design your XML system so you can request a "short" or
"long" description of a product, for example:

short: Product name, manufacturer, UPC, current price, weight
long: short + product description, cross links to other products, and much
more.

Alex

 

[Nergal]

Thanks Alex, interesting.

I will have a look how other vendors do it to see what I can learn.