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.