Tip of the Day: Help your program stand out with a datafeed

To help affiliates feature merchants and their products, ShareASale provides several tools to make it easier and less time consuming. Many of these tools rely on a merchant’s datafeed to pull information, so it is important to not only have one uploaded, but to also keep it up-to-date with your current products. Within an affiliate’s account, merchants who include a datafeed are more likely to be seen in a variety of ways. Take a look at some of the places where affiliates might only find your program or products if you supply a datafeed.

1. Merchant Search

When affiliates are on the hunt for their next partnership, they head to our Merchant Search page. From here, we offer a variety of filters to help them narrow in on the perfect partner. One of the filters offered is merchants who provide a datafeed. For some affiliates, access to a datafeed dictates their interest in the program. 

On the Merchant Search page, affiliates are also able to search by product. All product search results are pulled directly from the available datafeeds, so if we don’t have one uploaded to your account, your products won’t show up. 

2. Datafeed Merchants

A faster and more detailed way to see which brands provide a datafeed is by simply going to our “Datafeed Merchants” page. From this page, affiliates are able to access the data downloads or join the programs with uploaded product databases. If an affiliate is already joined to a program, they are also able to request FTP access from this page.

3. FTP Access

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) access can be requested for a variety of reasons, but in general, FTP access allows file and data transfers to be quick and seamless. Affiliates can then use the downloads on their websites, in product displays, auto-populated lists, or any other way that they display merchants or products on their site. 

4. Product Showcase

Powered by a merchant’s datafeed, our Product Showcase tool creates a dynamic widget-like banner that highlights a selection of Merchant(s) products, curated by keyword or category that rotates upon each page refresh! If you’ve recently updated your datafeed with products that match the category, it will automatically update on the affiliate’s site.

5. Make-A-Page

Similar to our Product Showcase, the Make-A-Page finds relevant products by using datafeeds and turns any page into an eCommerce experience! With the popularity of ‘Shop’ pages on a blogger’s website, our Make-A-Page tool is a low-tech way for affiliate to pick and choose the specific products that they want to share with their readers.