Annoying Merchant #125 - the Datafeed From H*ll!

[kayceee]

About 2 months ago I found a merchant with a datafeed that would be a nice complement to a site I have about a particular activity. Great! Signed with the program, subscribed to the feed, voila - a little shopping area for my site, complete with gifts, fan merchandise, apparel and supplies - perfect!

A couple weeks later I looked at one of my pages and to my surprise, nearly ALL of the thumbnail images were blank! Yikes! Was it a page-load problem? Nooo - the product images had been replaced by 1x1 blank images. Which made my product pages look [sarcasm]really professional[/sarcasm]. Were the items discontinued? Out of stock? Nooo, there they were in bright, living color on the merchant's site - but 90% of the image URL's had been changed!

I emailed them about it and got NO response, but it was magically fixed in the next datafeed. OK ... maybe they were making a major site change that got out of sync - strike #1 for bad site management, and strike #2 for not answering my email, but everything seemed on-track again ...

Then two weeks after that datafeed became available THE IMAGE FILES MOVED AGAIN!!! and the URLS are once more pointing blank "spacer" images

I give up! What's the game ? Are we playing "Musical Chairs"? If I catch the moving image file do I get a chance to win a free Plasma TV?

I can either:

1) Find some way to determine if the image is a "real" image or one of these blank images (filesize?) and display my own "image not available" filler - bad, but better than a completely blank space.

2) Write something I can run each month to grab all the images before they "disappear" and mirror them locally - do-able, and would make for faster page loads but at the cost of my storage and bandwidth.

3) Find another merchant - make that merchants , because I have yet to find anyone offering a similar combination of products - Not happy going back to square 1, but probably my best choice long term ...

In the "it could be worse" department, I hadn't spent any adwords dollars promoting them and only one of the products was "featured" on a popular part of my site <shudder> ...

Ugh!!!

This just hasn't been my week - thanks for letting me vent!

[Rosalind Gardner]

Hi kayceee,

That's awful... and they never got in touch with you! Shame on them!

I think I'll use your post when I do another 'Bad Mr. Merchant' article. It's a really good point and makes the case for providing affiliates with dynamic feeds.

Cheers,
Rosalind

[kayceee]

I look forward to reading it !

I just spent the better part of an hour making a filler image and implementing option #1, and using option #2 for the featured product - at least I have the technical skills to put those quick "band aids" on my site until I have time to do something better <sigh> ...

Dynamic feeds are nice - do you know of any that offer the same flexibility as a traditional datafeed? The ones I've used give you limited control over the display - but I'd still choose that over dealing with this nonsense!

[kayceee]

I found out what the problem is ...

The affiliate network saw my message to the merchant and replied. It seems they're hosted with Yahoo Stores and moving product images to different URLS every few days is a Y. Stores quirk. In order to display the merchant's product catalog, the network is doing exactly what I was going to do - downloading the images and hosting them locally. Something they need to do every time the datafeed changes, because of the changing URLS.

So it's still a datafeed from h*ll, but it's not directly the merchant's fault - a datafeed from any Yahoo stores site will have the same issue.

And a dynamic feed would be the cleanest workaround!