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Adding a product feed

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A product feed is an export of your catalogue (CSV, XML or JSON) that you host on a URL and that Affilae reads regularly. Once added to your programme, your affiliates can use it to build product links, widgets or comparison pages, and you can track your best sellers.

Requirements: a catalogue file permanently available at a public URL starting with http:// or https://, in CSV, XML or JSON format. The Top Sold Products use case belongs to the Engage plan: on the Track plan, an Upgrade chip appears next to the option and opens a sales contact window.

Prepare your file before adding it

Affilae analyses your file and detects its columns on its own. Six attributes must be matched, otherwise the feed stays incomplete:

Product ID: the unique identifier of each reference.
Title: the product name as it will be displayed.
Description: the commercial description of the product.
Landing page: the URL of the product page on your website.
Image: the URL of the main picture.
EAN: the barcode, or No match if you do not have one.

Other attributes are optional but make your products far more usable for affiliates: Price, Category, Availablity, Language, Additional images, Promotion and Promo code.

On the technical side, Affilae accepts three encodings: UTF-8, UTF-16 and ISO-8859-1. For a CSV file, four field separators are available: comma, semicolon, vertical bar and tabulation. For an XML file you will name the tag that delimits one product (XML Item); for a JSON file, the equivalent key (JSON Item).

Open the Products Feeds page

The page sits inside your programme menu, not in the global sidebar.

MANAGE MY PROGRAMS

My Shop

Configuration

My affiliates

Medias

Ads

Products Feeds

Vouchers

Clicks

Conversions

Payments

The “Products Feeds” sub-item under “Medias”, inside the programme menu.

In the sidebar, open Manage programs, then click the name of your programme.
Expand Medias and click Products Feeds.
At the top right of the list, click Add a product feed. If you have no feed yet, the button reads Add your first feed.

Choose what the feed is for

The first screen, titled Add a new feed, asks what this feed will be used for. One use case per feed:

Partnerships: the feed is intended for affiliates such as comparison sites, or for custom needs.
Top Sold Products: the feed is used to identify which products convert best with your partners. Engage plan only.
Custom searches in mobile app: shown as Coming soon and not selectable for now.

Select the use case, then click Start setup.

Fill in the feed details

The Creation of the feed screen is the first of three form steps, next to Attribute and value mapping and Feed verification.

Creation of the feed

Feed title

Full catalogue EN

URL or Flux

https://www.example.com/exports/catalogue-en.csv

File format

CSV

File encoding

UTF-8

Field separator

, (Comma)

Assign the feed to one or more partners.

All partnerships

Send notification to concerned partners

Cancel Next step

The “Creation of the feed” screen with sample values, for a feed intended for partnerships.

Enter a clear Feed title, for example the catalogue scope and its language.
Paste the address of your file into URL or Flux. It must start with http:// or https://.
Pick the File format: CSV, XML or JSON. The default value is CSV.
Pick the File encoding: UTF-8, UTF-16 or ISO-8859-1. The default value is UTF-8.
For a CSV file, select the Field separator used in your export.
For a Top Sold Products feed, also set the Feed language among FR, EN and ES.
For a Partnerships feed, pick the affiliates concerned under Assign the feed to one or more partners., or leave All partnerships.
Tick Send notification to concerned partners if you want to tell them the feed is available.
Click Next step.

Confirm the column mapping

Affilae then downloads your file and matches each column to an Affilae attribute. Two situations can occur:

Everything was recognised: you land directly on Feed verification.
Mandatory attributes are missing: the Attribute and value mapping screen shows “Your feed has errors. Please fill in the correct labels below for the column names.” Complete the drop-down lists, then click Next step.

On the Feed verification screen, check each row: the Affilae attribute on the left, your file column and a preview of its first value on the right. If a column does not exist in your export, choose No match. Finally click Create: the message “Feed added successfully” confirms the import.

Good to know: for a Top Sold Products feed, one extra attribute appears, the Conversion tag. It tells Affilae which field of the feed holds the product ID that your sales tracking sends back. Without that match, the Top selling products dashboard stays empty.

Check the import in the feed list

Back on the Products feeds page, your feed appears in the table with its status.

The product feed list with sample data: title, creation date, format, partners and status.

Four statuses exist:

Active, followed by the date: the feed is live and visible to the partners concerned.
Inactive, followed by the date: the feed exists but is no longer distributed.
Draft: the setup was never finished. The tooltip asks you to complete the feed.
Error: Affilae could not read or interpret the file.

The table also shows the Created the date, the Feed URL, the Partners who receive it and the feed Type. Under Actions you will find Get a tracked product feed, View feed configuration, Modify feed and Delete feed.

Fix a feed in error

When a feed fails, a warning triangle appears next to Products Feeds in the programme menu, so you do not have to watch the page. The status tooltip states: “This feed contains errors. Please check the column mapping. After correction, the status may take a few hours to update.”

Open the feed with the Modify feed action.
Check that the URL still answers and returns the expected file.
Review the declared format, encoding and separator: the message “Please check the format and the encoding chosen for your feed” points to a mismatch.
Go through the column mapping again up to Create.

If a specific error code shows in the red banner of the form, see the article Error codes linked to products feed, which lists every code and its effect on feed distribution.

What the feed brings to your programme

Your affiliates build product links and dynamic widgets that stay up to date without any action from you.
Comparison and deal sites can index your catalogue and send you qualified traffic.
You feed the Top selling products dashboard and see which references convert best, partner by partner.
Your prices, stock levels and promotions stay consistent across all partners, which cuts customer complaints.

Best practices

Host the file on a stable URL, with no authentication and no IP restriction, and do not change it.
Export at least once a day so that prices and availability stay reliable.
Name your feeds by scope, for example “Full catalogue”, “Sale catalogue”, so you can find them in the list.
Fill in Price, Category and Availablity even though they are optional: these are the columns affiliates use most.
After any change in your export structure, reopen the feed and confirm the column mapping again.

Tip: test your URL in a private browsing window before adding it. If the file does not open, or asks for a password, Affilae will not be able to read it either.

Real-life examples

A fashion retailer working with a comparison site. You export a CSV of 8,000 references, add it as a Partnerships feed and assign it to that comparison site only. It gets a tracked feed and your sales are attributed automatically.
A brand that wants to know its affiliation best sellers. You create a second feed as Top Sold Products, set the Conversion tag to the product ID sent by your tracking, and the dashboard displays the sales ranking.
A multilingual catalogue. You create one feed per language, with an explicit title, and assign each feed to the affiliates of the matching country.

Frequently asked
questions

Three formats are offered in the “File format” field: CSV, XML and JSON. Accepted encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and ISO-8859-1. For a CSV file, the field separator can be a comma, a semicolon, a vertical bar or a tabulation.

The status tooltip reads: “This feed contains errors. Please check the column mapping. After correction, the status may take a few hours to update.” Open the feed with “Modify feed”, check that the URL still answers, review the format, the encoding and the separator, then confirm the column mapping again. If an error code is displayed, see the article “Error codes linked to products feed”.

Two feeds cannot share the same title inside one programme. Pick a different title, for instance by adding the language or the catalogue scope. The same rule applies to the URL: one URL can only feed a single product feed.

Yes, this use case belongs to the Engage plan. On the Track plan, an “Upgrade” chip appears next to the option and opens a contact window with the sales team. The “Partnerships” use case is available with no plan condition.

Draft means the setup was never taken through to the “Create” button. The tooltip asks you to complete the feed. Reopen it with “Modify feed” and finish the mapping and verification steps.

In the Actions column of the list, use “Get a tracked product feed”. Select the partnership concerned: the window shows a URL under the “Tracked feed” heading, which you copy and send to the affiliate. The product links it contains already carry their tracking identifier.