HMV and Play.com both offer pretty decent value. Using offshore operations, they can give great prices and they include delivery in display prices which I think is always an attractive proposition. So how do you choose between them when deciding who to work with.

Well, I went with HMV on a video games site because their CSV product feed was a manageable size. When I say manageable, I mean I could open it in Excel. Yes, like most users, I'm still using a version that has a row limit of 65,000. Play.com's product feed was simply too big for me to work with using the tools I choose to use.

But now HMV's product feed has gone to over 120,000 rows which makes my job harder. I would be peeved at this, but almost at the same time, Play.com took the sensible decision to break their feed up into several feeds based on categories and now I can easily get a nice 2000 row product feed of computer games.

So the lesson for merchants? Where possible, provide usable product feeds to your affiliates. Don't make their job needlessly difficult. If you do, they may just work with someone else. For merchants that have inescapably large product feeds, I'd actually like to see more of them offering web services, but I guess that's another post....

Labels: product feeds