Feed Cart Development

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.