Feed Cart Development

Bill and I are off to Boston for the upcoming 2008 Affiliate Summit East Conference.  Where we hope to meet a lot of future users of FeedCart!  We will both be making the rounds and attending several of the parties so we can’t wait to meet you all.  At Summit we will be getting ready to take accounts for the soon to be released beta version of FeedCart coming to a web browser near you shortly after Summit!

We are both very excited about the new beta version which features many improvements to the feed management interface

• Improved look & feel for an intuitive widget creation & management experience
• Real time updates to your feeds when updating them (no need to save or go back and forward in the current linear step based setup)
• Extensive use of the Yahoo! User Interface library.  Which offers desktop application like quality interface components such as sliders, drag & drop, color pickers, and more.

Along with the Interface improvement,  our subscription based widgets will appear in this upcoming release as well.  Subscription widgets are widgets whose content/products are selected by a merchant or their representative and can be subscribed to by affiliates.  Affiliates then have the option to customize the look & feel of the widget to adapt to their website.  When a merchant updates their widget’s products all subscribers of that widget will have their products updated while still keeping the custom appearance that they selected.

While this release will mark the beginning of our beta test phase, it will initially still be by invite only for a month or so for testing purposes before we open registration to the public.

Want to get an invite?  Just speak to Bill or me at Summit next week or drop us a line through our contact form.

Happy Trails!

Jason

Earlier posts talked about the content of Feed Cart widgets (static, dynamic, and subscription) and the structure (tabbed widgets, rotating product displays, menu based multi paged stores), now I’d like to mention a few things about widget style customization.

Currently Feed Cart allows users to pick their own color choices, font & border styles, and widget widths. However this must be done each time for every Feed Cart widget using a text based form. Expanding on these options is one of our highest priorities in development. Within a few weeks Feed Cart alpha testers will be able to use default & custom style profiles to make customizing the look & feel of their widgets even faster. Color selectors and font editors from the YUI library will be used to improve the creation of style profiles.

We also are looking to provide the ability to have rounded corners for all Feed Cart widgets so they may fit more naturally in your websites that use curved borders. This feature may or may not be available for our public launch, pending how well dynamic image creation performs on a large scale.

Our goal is to have a fast and intuitive interface for Feed Cart users to create nearly any style possible. Please leave a comment if you have any feature requests for style customization.

The previous posting talked a little bit about the initial capabilities of Feed Cart, this post will talk a bit about the interface that Feed Cart uses for affiliates to create their product displays.

Currently the Feed Cart interface is a simple linear step based form that uses AJAX technology to create and edit affiliates’ feeds. Prior to public launch the interface will be radically overhauled. The overhauled interface will incorporate the Yahoo! User Interface library (YUI for short). By taking advantage of the powers of YUI, Feed Cart will be able to provide a desktop application like experience for Feed Cart users.

This advanced interface takes a lot of work to create, but it’s worth it in order to provide Feed Cart users the best experience. Due to the length of development, we decided to make a simpler and less advanced interface so we could begin testing other aspects of Feed Cart while the final interface was finalized.

Current Feed Cart alpha testers can expect to see the new interface when they log into Feed Cart beginning at the end of August.

This is the first in a series of posts that explain the features that feedcart.com currently has, what features it will have prior to the public launch in late August / early September, and what features we’d like to include further down the road.

The basic concept behind Feed Cart is to aggregate online merchants’ affiliate data feeds into a local database and provide a GUI for Feed Cart users to create embedded widgets showcasing the online merchants products, for which the affiliates of course get their full commission.

Datafeed management from an affiliate perspective can be very time consuming, especially for merchants with large datafeeds. It can take several hours to download a large datafeed in csv format, verify the contents, then import it into a temporary table, verify again, and then switch your live table with the temp table. With Feed Cart an affiliate does not have to worry about this time consuming hassle, nor do they need the technical expertise of database management.

Datafeed management is just part of what Feed Cart does. It also provides an easy to use GUI for affiliates to create the html necessary to display the products in a wide variety of formats. After creating their widgets, affiliates will be given a single line of Javascript or PHP code to embed into their site.

Currently the available formats include:

• A simple widget that displays multiple products in however many columns and rows they choose.
• A tabbed widget that can display up to 3 simple widgets of products.

Formats not yet available but coming prior to the public launch include:

• A product showcase that features a single product with a large image and several related products listed beneath it with smaller thumbnails. By clicking on a thumbnail, the featured product on top will be swapped with the related one.
• Fully paginated and categorized stores. Affiliates will be able to create a menu that lists categories of products and have each menu item go to a seperate page in order to maximize SEO benefits.
• Subscription widgets. Affiliate Managers & Outsourced Program Managers that represent online merchants will be able to create widgets for seasonal items, current promotions, etc and publish those widgets for affiliates to use on their sites. When the Affiliate manager updates the widget all affiliates who subscribe to that widget will get the updated products automatically. Affiliates will be able to customize the style of their subscribed widgets, but not the content.

This is the first post in an ongoing blog documenting the development of an exciting new tool for affiliates to use in promoting merchant products. The site http://feedcart.com will be going up live on May 1st, however accounts will not be open to the public until the end of the Summer / Early Fall. At that time the site will be fully functional and thoroughly tested in time for the holiday shopping season.

Until then you can contact us to request an account at http://feedcart.com/contact.html. Just let us know a little bit about yourself and we’ll give you a quick tutorial over the phone on how to use it. Well known members of the affiliate marketing forum, A Best Web, will be given priority.

While we are in the ‘alpha’ stage of development, features and UI improvements will be updated on a weekly basis. Prior to opening up the site for public use, there will be a two week freeze on development. Once the site goes live, updates will be less frequent in order to maintain the highest standards of availability.

We’re very excited about the possibilities that this tool will create for affiliates and online merchants. We look forward to working with our alpha testers to create the best possible tool for affiliate marketers and online merchants alike.