Product Feed Workshop

An Interactive Session

Introduction

• Who are we?– Lee Brignell-Cash (COO FusePump)– Robert Durkin (CTO FusePump)– Liane Dietrich (MD Linkshare UK)

• Why listen to us?– We are a trusted provider of 3rd party product feeds in UK– We provide daily help & support to users of our feeds– We run regular affiliate training webinars

• What will we be doing in this session?– Creating a feed driven affiliate site from scratch in less than 30

minutes– Answering questions on the example– …or on your own product feed challenges & issues

How is this session interactive?

• Visit the session homepage– http://fusepump.com/events/a4u/

• What’s there?– File archive

• Contains all the sample files used in the workshop– Video Tutorial

• So you can follow this workshop later in the comfort of your hotel room!

– PDF Tutorial• In case you’re having trouble sleeping..

• Q&A session at the end

How to build a feed driven site

• What will I need to know?– HTML– Basic understanding of MySQL– Basic understanding of PHP

• What will I need to have?– Web server with the following packages installed:

• PHP• MySQL• Apache

• What if I have none of the above?!– Fear not, you’re in the right session..

Finding a web host

Designing your feed system

DatabaseFeed Script

Where to get the feed

• This example will utilise the Argos product feed• Other sources of feeds include:

– Networks• LinkShare• Commission Junction• TradeDoubler• Etc..

– Aggregators• (e.g. price comparison sites)

A quick look inside the feed

Building your feed system

1. Create a database to store the product data– Design the database tables– Create the database tables

2. Create a feed processing script that will:– Download the feed– Read products from the feed– Save products to the database

3. Create one or more product pages that can:– Read product data from the database– Output product data in HTML

Designing the database table

• Key considerations:– What product data do you want to display on your product pages?– Do you want to allow users to search or filter the product data on any

of the product attributes?– Every product should have a unique identifier in your database

productsid

titleurl

imageUrlprice

priceWascategoryinStock

Creating the database table

• Live demo

The feed processing script

• Live demo

Creating a product page

• Live demo

What next?

• Customise the product page to match your site– or create your own from scratch..

• Implement search functionality on your site– instead of static product pages, let the user query your product

database

• List products from multiple merchants on your site– Expand your product database by adding additional feeds

• Track outward clicks– so that you can see what products users are most frequently

interacting with on your site

Q&A Session

moderated by Liane Dietrich