September 23 2012

Datafeedr Review

Update July 2016: The article below refers to the original Datafeedr Factory which is great if you’re a beginner, but we highly recommend you use the Datafeedr API instead – it integrates with WooCommerce and your store will not have the 100,000 product limit and can actually scale to many millions of products.

We love Datafeedr. It’s a fantastic tool for building affiliate comparison sites. It integrates with pretty much every affiliate network that exists (with the only notable exception being Zanox Update: they now have Zanox too!) and allows you to build niche affiliate websites very quickly.

It creates product search, product category and product detail pages within WordPress and allows your users to search and compare any affiliated products you choose to add to your store. Here’s an example from the Fitness Saver site we built:

How Does It Work?

Datafeedr connects to all the affiliate networks and downloads all the affiliate data-feeds that exist. It pulls this data into a central administration area called the Datafeedr Factory. From this factory, you configure which categories you would like to have inside your shop and which products you want inside those categories.

Inside the factory there is also an editor to manipulate how the shop appears once it ends up on your WordPress site. This is a highly configurable section with many elements and variables available for use to help you build your store.

Building a Datafeedr store for a specific niche

Using Datafeedr to build your affiliate niche store is a matter of the following steps:

Register, download and install the Datafeedr plugin to your WordPress site
Find the products you wish to promote through the Datafeedr product finder
Join the relevant affiliate networks and apply to the merchants whose products you wish to promote
Create your shopping categories in the factory and add your chosen products
Set up your search page, category and product detail page styles inside the factory
From inside WordPress, click ‘Update products and settings’ and Datafeedr will download everything it needs into your WordPress installation

What Products Are Available

Datafeedr works very well for affiliates that provide data feeds. The vast majority of product-based affiliates now provide data feeds so that means with Datafeedr, most products in the world are available to promote.

You can also integrate Amazon products, although these are slightly trickier in that they have to be added one by one.

Finally, they provide a ‘custom product’ option where you can add any product you like by defining the product name, the image and the affiliate link – meaning that you can add products which don’t have data feeds. Obviously this final option is more time consuming but it can be important to make your niche store effective by allowing you to add products that don’t have datafeeds. Affiliate networks available with Datafeedr

What Products Are Not Available?

As previously mentioned, Datafeedr do not currently support Zanox. The reason for this is as follows: To identify a product and which affiliate referred the customer to that product, most affiliate networks use two numbers – an Affiliate ID and a Product ID. With these types of affiliates, Datafeedr simply substitutes your Affiliate ID in the relevant place when building your store to display on WordPress.

What Zanox do is they create a single number which represents the product and the affiliate. When a customer is referred to a product through the Zanox network, Zanox convert this single number into the underlying Affiliate ID and Product ID. Unfortunately, without gaining access to the your Zanox account (security risk), Datafeedr cannot access these single numbers. This may change in future, but in the meantime you can add these products manually using ‘custom products’.

The other notable omission is when companies do not have datafeeds. This tends to happen with the smaller companies. In these cases, you can still add the products using ‘custom products’.

Finally, in some cases datafeeds may exist but the merchant has not accepted Datafeedr into their affiliate program. This means Datafeedr does not have access to the data feed in order to show it in the factory. In these cases, we’ve found that a phone call to the affiliate manager generally fixes the problem and gets Datafeedr authorised and then Eric or Stefan from Datafeedr will update the factory within an hour or two so the products become available for use.

Pricing

Datafeedr don’t take any commission (unlike some other datafeed systems I’ve seen). Instead, they charge an affordable rate of $27 per month for a single store scaling upwards to unlimited sites for $97 per month.

You should note that they do have a limit of 100,000 products per store which seems to be for two reasons – performance and to help their pricing model.

Multiple Installations

You can install multiple stores into one website but in order to do so you have to install multiple instances of WordPress so it gets a little messy. You might wish to do this, for example, if you are building a UK and a US store. In this case you can have your stores located at

www.myaffiliatesite.com/uk

www.myaffiliatesite.com/us

Or alternatively you can set this kind of thing up using subdomains, e.g.

us.myaffiliatesite.com

uk.myaffiliatesite.com

Support Available

One of the best things about Datafeedr is the level of support on offer. Included at all price points is unlimited support through their support forums. There are two guys providing support, Eric and Stefan, and the level of support is nothing short of amazing. It is not uncommon to post a question up to the Datafeedr forums and receive an answer inside the hour.

They answer EVERY question and are incredibly knowledgeable about their product and affiliate marketing – it’s almost like having someone else added to your team.

Summary

Datafeedr offers an easy way to create browsable, searchable affiliate comparison sites. Millions of products are available, the support is fantastic and the price is great. If it’s an affiliate site you’re looking to build, it’s worth choosing to use WordPress JUST so you can get access to Datafeedr.

Let us know your own experience of using Datafeedr in the comments section below.

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