DataFeedFile.com Affiliate Shopping Tools News / Blogs

Dear Everyone,

DFF now support additional tracking variable (Placement ID) support for Shopzilla Publisher Program.

Shopzilla's implementation of additional tracking is a bit different than the affiliate networks and it is not as flexible. You have to SET Shopzilla Placement IDs from your Shopzilla Publisher Account and use those by appending &subid=<> behind your DFF clickthrough URL or in the calling URL when getting content from DFF.

For more information about Shopzilla's Placement ID support on DFF please read the WIKI document above DFF SUBID support. Shopzilla special circumstances are located towards the end of the wiki document.

http://wiki.datafeedfile.com/dffSubID

Regards,

--Andrew

Hello Everyone,

DFF now support SUBID for Amazon Associate Program.

Amazon's implementation of additional tracking is a bit different than the affiliate networks and it is not as flexible. You have to generate additional (unique) Amazon Tracking IDs and use those by appending &subid=<> behind your DFF clickthrough URL or in the calling URL when getting content from DFF.

For more information about Amazon's Tracking ID support on DFF please read the WIKI document above DFF SUBID support. Amazon special circumstances are located towards the end of the wiki document.

http://wiki.datafeedfile.com/dffSubID

Regards,

--Andrew

DFF's Product Showcase WordPress Plugin is now available! Like the Featured Product plugin, you get price comparison directly in your blog. The difference? You can display an entire showcase with as many products as you wish, with an overview, pictures, details, and prices! Check it out here

We can now host your website! Why host with us? Because when you host your site on the same network as our web services, delay, latency, and data transfer time are practically eliminated. Plus, we're cheaper than most plans out there. Read more about our hosting services here

DFF's first version of the Featured Products WordPress Plugin is now available! With this plugin you (affiliate / blogger) can easily insert a product into your WordPress Post or Page. This plugin is very easy to use; it will add a DFF button right on the Post / Page editor toolbar which will automatically insert a WordPress shortcode within your Post and show the product in the middle of your blog.

The Featured Products WordPress Plugin will generate search engine indexable HTML code (not javascript) which means the content will be SEO friendly. The plugin delivers the product image, title, description (optional), list of stores selling the product (number of stores is adjustable) with affiliate trackable links.

Read more about the DFF Featured Products WordPress Plugin here...
http://wordpress.datafeedfile.com Continue reading "Price Comparison in your WordPress blog!" »

1. Products Showcase: Allows affiliates to show multiple products in a grid / list layout format. The Showcase Plugin was designed to fill a large amount of space on a web page and display an attractive selection of products with images, a brief title, the number of stores selling each product and the lowest price.

2. Price Comparison: The full Price Comparison WordPress Plugin will contain almost all the different shopping tools available on DFF. Using this Price Comparison plugin, an affiliate would be able to create a fully featured price comparison shopping site using WordPress. This plugin adds functionality to your blog and we still highly encourage all affiliates to blog and add their own unique content as added value instead of just deploying general price comparison web sites.

DataFeedFile is proud to announce our first ever WordPress plug-in! We plan to unveil this beauty some time next week.

What will it do, you ask? It will allow you to put a product feed in the middle of your blog. That way, you can display products in the middle of your content. If you’re an expert on a product, or just simply want to discuss a product, this plug-in is for you.

Think of it as a Google ad, but instead of text or banners and pennies on the click, you get the product image, price comparison, and commission on sales!
Please check our blog, or follow us on Twitter for more frequent updates, and be the first to know when we roll out our WordPress plug-in!

DataFeedFile has just officially launched our very own freelance division. What does this mean? We have full-time programmers here for web development and programming! Now we can help customize your price comparison website to your heart’s content.

Please check out our portfolio page to learn more about this new service. Space is limited, so please contact us soon for a free quote!

Providing a web hosting service was an idea given by one of our successful affiliate.

He would like to have faster access and reduced latency to get HTML content and/or query DFF' web services.
He said "speed is a big factor when it comes to shopping online, if a page takes more than 30 seconds, the shopper is clicking out...".

The added benefit of DFF providing your web site hosting is so that your website's request to DFF database servers will NOT have to travel through the internet. Your web site will request and receive data from DFF servers within <3ms latency usually.

Being that the DFF hosting server will be within our internal network, larger data and search results (which are possible when using XML / JSON) are much faster on our Gigabit network.

We are still testing but would like to get the word out to our affiliates about this upcoming service which will be available by May 1, 2009.

Many Thanks...

--Andrew

Selecting which merchants to use with DFF tools can take a long time,

We have made this process easier for you especially if you are selecting all merchants from Shopzilla Affiliate Program.

Under the Affiliate Login / Merchants Tab, you can now MASS SELECT by category or affiliate network/program.

To access this feature, look for a link called on the left navigation column:

Mass Use / Not Use
By Network
By Category

Using the Mass Use by Network, you can select or deselect all merchants in your account from a particular Affiliate Network.

Using the Mass Use by Category, you can select or deselect all merchants in your account from a particular Category.

Again as an example, since Shopzilla merchants are all inclusive (when you get approved from Shopzilla affiliate program you are approved for all Shopzilla's merchants in their program), you should do the same at DFF, just select to use ALL Shopzilla Merchants.

Next improvement on the merchants tab will be to import / export to tab delimited file....

Thanks

--Andrew

For increased security, DFF will now recommend using the function file_get_contents() or cURL instead of include();

Remote inclusion of remote PHP file or any remote file is a security hole in PHP. It has worked well for DFF for almost 3 years because the files affiliates are including from DFF are not malicious. Nevertheless it is not best practice.

Instead of using:

include("http://www.datafeedfile.com/some_dff_script.php?affid=...&".$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']);

DFF recommends change to:

echo file_get_contents("http://www.datafeedfile.com/some_dff_script.php?affid=....&".$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']);

or you can use the cURL library/extension like this:

$ch = curl_init("http://www.datafeedfile.com/some_dff_script.php?affid=....&".$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE); if(($DFF_output = curl_exec($ch))===FALSE) die("Error getting content from DFF"); else echo $DFF_output; curl_close($ch);

We will create a new wiki documentation page to explain these new methods:
http://wiki.datafeedfile.com/dffRemoteInclude

Dear Affiliates,

Since there have been increasing demand to use DFF with a flat monthly fee, we have just made this service available to the public.

A flat fee monthly service will basically eliminate the 4th click sharing in exchange for a flat monthly fee.

http://billing.datafeedfile.com/cart.php?gid=2

The payment can be accepted by Paypal and/or Google Checkout using credit cards, etc...

Please keep in mind that this is a continual monthly subscription service. There is no contract. You can cancel service and return to 4th click shared commission model at any time.

Hello All,

We have created many web sites for DFF affiliates on the side to test our PHP Library / Framework which uses our JSON web services.

Using JSON / XML allows programmer to be very flexible and have full control of the output. Using JSON / XML does require a higher learning curve and/or possibly an experience programmer. But we believe the result is worth every minute spent.

Because creating a fully working price comparison site is quite difficult even when using DataFeedFile.com's web services, we have created the DFF PHP Client Library which has been tested many times for the past 6 months.

Here is a link to DFF's first fully working Price Comparison Shopping sample web site using our own DFF PHP Client Library:

http://sample-phpapi.datafeedfile.com

The above example website is a niche (vertical market) for pets supply specific products. But the basic concept is there to make a general price comparison shopping site.

The entire web site can be downloaded from a compressed ZIP file and only require modification of the DFF/DFF_config.php (main DFF configuration file) to make it work.

Our first example is only available for PHP programmers right now.

The entire source code, picture, icon, CSS, etc are all in the ZIP file. You are free to change and customize to your own liking. You may even rework it and use it to develop other people's web site. The only restriction is that you have to leave the credits declaration to give credit back to DataFeedFile.com.

Other niche price comparison sites we have developed are:

http://freelance.datafeedfile.com/comparessd
http://freelance.datafeedfile.com/icomparenetbooks

If you are looking for a Deal / Coupon site, we have an Open Source coupon sample site also here:

http://sample.datafeedfile.com/demo/dse/

Please post any question or bug at our Suppor Ticket system.

Regards,

Andrew -@- DataFeedFile.com
( Founder ) - Affiliate Price Comparison Shopping Tools

DFF's version 1 XML feed for price search engine was started when we did not have much experience creating web services / API.

Since then we have created JSON web services and discovered our XML feed was lacking a lot of information, so we decided to write a version 2 of our XML feed. To use version 2, you simply can replace the file name xml_search.php to xml_search2.php.

Please review the version 2 XML formats and adapt / upgrade as necessary.

If you find any bug or problem in version 1 or 2, please open support ticket and we will address those problems immediately.

Thank you

Andrew

Dear All,

We will be changing our SSL certificate tonight Wed Feb 4 2009 starting about 10pm CST to about 12pm CST.

We have had reports of bad SSL notices and warnings, this is why we are replacing the SSL Cert with a better certificate.

There may be errors and issues for Affiliate Login during that time.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Andrew

After deeper research I found out that our mid (merchant ID) for CJ is not the actual merchant ID that CJ uses.

CJ affiliate network system is one of the best. Having said that CJ implements a very flexible system which requires several different types of IDs.

These are CJ's IDs explained:

1. advertiserID / aid = advertiser ID who are merchants advertising on CJ. This identify a unique merchant. This is the number DFF should have on our MID field.

2. advertisingID = confusingly sometimes also called aid same as above. This ID is used to identify unique advertisement such as banners, text links, and product catalog. Each merchant product catalog uses a different advertisingID. This is the ID that DFF uses for our MID which is not exactly correct because it does not identify the advertiser/merchant but it identify the advertising. AdvertisingID is used in the data feed / product catalog file of all CJ merchants data feed. That is where we got our wrong MID from. Don't worry, your commission and tracking is still valid since the advertisingID is the same for all affiliates.

2. PID = publisher ID. aka Affiliate ID. You can have more than one publisher ID, because for each web site you register with your CJ account you will be given a different PID.

3. Account ID / Account Number = This is your one and only account number which identify your CJ account.

In summary, DFF uses advertisingID for our MID in regards to CJ. This is not correct and needs to be corrected in the future.

Don't worry about your commission earning. We checked, the adverstisingID placed in the product catalog / data feed files is the same for all CJ affiliates. Therefore it does not matter eventhough DFF does not have the actual CJ advertiser ID, it is actually not used or needed during referral clickthrough.

At this time we will continue to show CJ's advertisingID in our CJ MID eventhough it is wrong. We will work as quickly as we can to fix this problem soon.

In the meantime to search for CJ merchant, you can only use the merchant name for now. Sorry.

Andrew
________________
Andrew -@- DataFeedFile.com
( Founder ) - Affiliate Price Comparison Shopping Tools

Extended Merchant List (download) with Affiliate Network info + Affiliate Merchant MID + Product Count + Category count

We have created a different merchant list downloadable script for Affiliates to download your list of SELECTED DFF merchants in XLS, TAB or PHP format.

This new EXTENDED format have all the previous fields plus the following extra fields:

mernum (DFF merchant number) (old)
mername (DFF merchant name) (old)
merurl (merchant website URL) (old)
merlogo (merchant logo URL) (old)
status (always active because this export only shows active) (old)

network (affiliate network name)
network_mid (affiliate network merchant MID)
product_count (number of products in DFF database from this merchant)
category_count (number of categories matched to this merchant products)

Here are the links (you have to be logged in as DFF affiliate):
http://www.datafeedfile.com/affiliat...t.php?type=xls
http://www.datafeedfile.com/affiliat...t.php?type=tab
http://www.datafeedfile.com/affiliat...t.php?type=php

Please let me know if there is anything wrong with this new script.
________________

As planned... right after DFF switched to our faster bandwidth internet line, we will bring our Image Server in-house.

I have been working on the images for a few days, and I am almost done. We are implementing load-balancing of the image serving amongst 5 web servers.

You will not see any improvement of more product images until about 1 week from today. Why? because the system learns and get new images automatically. This new system has been designed to accommodate multiple images per product even multiple sizes in the future. As far now (near future) we just want to make sure we have as many pictures as possible for every product.

Thanks for everyone's patience.

DFF price search engine now supports logical "OR" search conditions.

The search tips pages has been updated automatically for those of you using pregenerated HTML scripts via Javascript and Dynamic Scripting Languages.

Here are the additional instructions added on to the search tips:

Search Logical Conditions (AND / OR)
multiple words separated by spaces are always treated as AND logical condition.
Example: star wars will search for star AND wars.

to use the OR logical condition, insert the word OR between words.
Example: basketball or baseball bag will search for basketball OR baseball bag.

Hi Everyone,

We have created and just released a new Merchants / Stores listing or directory with search capability. This merchant list has been released with Full Open Source.

Here is the link to the Demo:

http://sample.datafeedfile.com/demo/merlist/

Features of this merchant list / directory:

1. CSS compliant output, completely customizable.
2. Directory style listing with merchant logo.
3. Merchant short description
4. Number of Deals
5. Number of Products
6. Number of Categories
7. Adjustable click-through target-URL
8. Sort by Store Name, Number of Products
9. First Letter Index with count of how many store per first letter
10. Search engine to search merchant / store by store name keyword.

We will create a PHP and Javascript remote include script also for this Merchant List tool in the future.

I have just created a different type of banner which slides left - right and uses PSE (price search engine) search results.

Here is the Demo:

http://sample.datafeedfile.com/demo/...mbnail_slider/

as many has known I am promoting and releasing all examples Open Source and using DFF PHP Client Library. You are free to use, copy and change as long as you leave credit of original work to DataFeedFile.com (DFF).

Thanks

We have a new web services feature to return back list of searched keywords. Search keywords are search phrases used by shoppers and/or users of affiliate sites on PSEs (all kinds of PSEs are included).

All of these keywords are collected anonymously to create two lists:

1. Top Searched Keywords (refreshed daily)
2. Recent Searched Keywords (refreshed every hour)

To learn more about these web services to retreive JSON / XML formatted searched keywords list, see our Wiki Documentation on this subject.

Example for Top Searched Keyword in JSON and XML
Example for Recent Searched Keyword in JSON and XML

Now there is a way to get a list of:

Each merchant's Top ### Products

Each merchant's Random Products

These are web services delivering data via JSON / XML format.

Go learn more visit the links below:

Documentation Wiki for Merchant Top / Random Products Web Services

Example for Merchant Top Products JSON / XML
Example for Merchant Random Products JSON / XML

Dear Affiliates,

We would like to improve our service. Please help us by completed this quick survey that we created.
Let us know what you want us to improve. Any suggestion, inputs are welcome.

Below is the link of the survey. All inputs are strictly confidential.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=UXMJBeDQ4pBS0HcEn1PbiQ_3d_3d

Thank you for using DFF and Thank you for your support.

About 2 months ago, I just realized, what is missing and would help many affiliates most is the capability to simply download a fully working site, then customize it. I am sure it is much easier than starting from scratch.

I am going to call this idea DFF's Instant Web Site. Since then I have been working on the backend infrastructure to accomplish that goal. Some needed components were JSON data delivery, PHP Client library, DFFML and REST receive and response system.

As of today... we have almost finished creating all the components. Coincidentally many affiliates are also getting more serious and demanded more serious / real examples.

http://opensource.datafeedfile.com
I have also created an Open Source Code repository using another wiki.
It is located at http://opensource.datafeedfile.com. The purpose of this Open Source Code wiki is to collect short source codes. For example, sometimes I answer a question with a short piece of code, previously I have no way to share, from now on we will put them at http://opensource.datafeedfile.com.

http://sample.datafeedfile.com
sample.datafeedfile.com will contain "FULL WEB SITE" solutions only, along with the source code for each page and also the full web site download via zip compressed file. This is just an introduction of the DFF Instant Web Site concept. We will create many more designs and templates for different web site functionality. All will be open source and all will be full web site solutions.
Visit http://sample.datafeedfile.com
Please give me feedback about this concept

That is all for now... have a good weekend everyone...

Andrew