What is a product feed?

At its most basic level, a feed provides publishers with the raw building blocks they need to build a website and promote you. A feed tells a publisher about types of products you sell, how much they cost, what colour they are and various other specs that are relevant to your business. Without a good feed, a content or comparison publisher will really struggle to include your products on their site.

It naturally follows that the more information you can share about the products you sell, the better the quality of affiliate website that can be built to promote you. For example, an electronics retailer could have a feed containing their entire stock inventory, part numbers, spec details and compatibility information whilst a fashion retailer could have details of size, colours, material and so on. Any publisher wanting to promote either of these advertisers can then use this feed to quickly find or display the products they require on their website, instead of searching the retailer’s site manually (which many wouldn’t do).

Why is a product feed needed?

Feeds allow publishers to quickly find and display links without having to manually create their own deeplinks each time. It also gives them direct access to millions of product details and prices, allowing them to search and filter and display them in a variety of ways. From price comparisons and daily deals, to niche or general interest products, there are any number of ways that the data can be used to drive traffic to your site.

A good feed can contribute as much as 10% of your affiliate program’s sales so its importance can not be underestimated. A good feed is also fundamental in being able to attract all publishers types to your programme.

How can I provide a product feed?

In order to provide a consistent data-set for Publishers to use on their sites, submitted feeds have to conform to certain standards. These standards ensure that publishers can get product sets from multiple advertisers that meet the crit

Feeds can be submitted as either delimited text, or XML.

Enhanced Feeds (google feeds)

New enhanced feeds are now available, these are google feed formatted for your publishers, with the ability to push updated feeds at a significantly faster rate than the legacy feeds. To learn how to create your feeds in this format, please see this API documentation (Available only to Accelerate and Advanced Advertisers)

Building an Awin Product Feed

This page enlists all the required attributes that you will need in order to build your product feed to be compatible to the Awin system. These are split in 3 categories:

1) File Types

2) File Hosting

3) Column Descriptions

1: File Types

The Awin system allows for two format types; CSV and XML.

Delimited text (CSV/TSV)

With the formatting of this file you can choose to add a header row which will identify the columns, i.e.product_id, product_name. On the second and corresponding rows you would add the data pertaining to the initial header row.

Note: We are unable to accept a feed in the Excel file format (.xls).

Compression and Character Sets

We accept UTF-8 and optionally files compressed in ZIP or GZIP formats.

Important Considerations

• If the descriptions that you use or any other field contains the delimiter character (e.g. the comma) then that field must be enclosed by "double quotes". Similarly, if a field contains quotes, those quotes can be escaped by using double quotes "".

• Please ensure the encoding of the file is UTF-8 otherwise the feed may not import correctly, especially if you wish to offer foreign language feeds.

XML (Extensive Mark-up Language)

You can either provide XML in our Awin Advertiser XML DTD 1.4 File Format.

Alternatively, if you have XML in another format (like Google Shopping), we can usually import these feeds. Please contact your account manager for more information.

2: File Hosting

3: Column Descriptions

For Legacy Feeds:
Details of each of the columns for L, primarily for CSV feeds. Advertiser XML DTD 1.4 File Format gives details about how the XML feeds work and which of the columns are supported.

For Enhanced Feeds:
It is included in the API documentation, however a snapshot of the google formatted columns can be seen in this article.