The quality of data feeds over the past year have been on the decline based on various factors in the market and the increasing number of products that must be processed. For simple systems, manual links and blogs this will not be visible, but when looking at enterprise class sites for affiliate networking these issues cause many data processing problems increasing the amount of technology required and staff to maintain the solutions.
Examples of these issues include the following.
Commission Junction
For the tested retailers, the Commission Junction data feed solution changes the domain name every time a data feed is pulled. This causes automated systems which perform delta checks to update the products when nothing in reality has changed, systems will then automatically perform a full product data reload every day. When dealing with high-end sites which implement filters, multi-currency among others, the overhead to process this data puts an increased load on the servers requiring more processing, more advanced technology and higher costs.
Affiliate Window
Affiliate Window recently made changes to their data feed systems which caused a level of disruption although are understood to now be resolved. For a selected retailer a product was loaded to the website and was static for one month, the product was then removed from the data feed by the retailer however the product is still available on the retailers website for purchase which questions whether any leads passed will generate revenue or not. Another problem encountered with Affiliate Window is with one of the largest department stores having 80,000 products in their data feed. On average it is expected 1-2% of products will change or be new daily, with this department store data feed over 10% are changing per day with thousands of products being removed from the data feed but the same products being added with a different sku, do these generate revenue or is the lead lost. It is unclear if these problems are due to the change in their system or other factors.
LinkShare
The LinkShare network seems to be more stable, obtainable support staff and have a cleaner set of data however the system is technically harder to manage with data feed loading such as lack of headers in the feed, these types of differences require extra programming to load the data sets and reduce stability with an associated increase in development costs. We also understand that retailers on LinkShare have a reject first ask questions later approach either via the LinkShare automated rejection or manually, this makes it harder for less established businesses to obtain and use the data.
The quality of the data in the feeds is becoming worse, areas such as lack of category detail to be able to map feed categories to the target website categories, lack of information such as sizing or color, constantly changing attribute order or size additions causing product reloads, unstable product removals from the feeds, and lack of transparency whether these changes affect revenue means that affiliates have a difficult time keeping track of the changes and making sure that they are being credited with leads.
As our solutions are based on enterprise technology we are able to quickly adapt them to changes, smaller businesses will have a harder time as they will have a larger code base and therefore cannot easily adapt to constantly updating data, missing datasets and discrepancies in the feeds. With margins for affiliate networking relatively low this means that more and more SMEs will find affiliate networking unprofitable leaving only companies such as ShopStyle with larger technology budgets, those with access to enterprise technology, or small niche markets where the discrepancies and data quality are less of an issue.
