Sunday, May 20, 2007
Work with your affiliates, not against them
So, I had a rant on Friday after I downloaded an updated product feed and its column headers had been changed, which broke my site - just as I was about to go out.
I got my site all fixed up now and it didn't take long. I'm not an affiliate that begrudges doing work to keep things ticking over. I see this as a job, and in any job, "stuff" happens and you have to do work in order to maintain a steady ship. I have no complaints about that.
But I do have a complaint about people acting in a stupid way which needlessly causes issues when a little bit of thought and planning could have avoided any problems. I can only think that the merchant involved doesn't actually understand how a product feed is typically used, and therefore doesn't understand the impact of making changes willy nilly to column headers.
If you use a product feed as a datasource, then the column headers are your fieldnames. And if they change, your code doesn't work. Understanding the impact of system changes and communicating them effectively in advance to interested parties should be essential to anyone running an affiliate program.
I don't want to labour a point, but it puts me in mind of that famous quote from Geoffrey Howe: "It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease, only for them to find, as the first balls are being bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain"
I got my site all fixed up now and it didn't take long. I'm not an affiliate that begrudges doing work to keep things ticking over. I see this as a job, and in any job, "stuff" happens and you have to do work in order to maintain a steady ship. I have no complaints about that.
But I do have a complaint about people acting in a stupid way which needlessly causes issues when a little bit of thought and planning could have avoided any problems. I can only think that the merchant involved doesn't actually understand how a product feed is typically used, and therefore doesn't understand the impact of making changes willy nilly to column headers.
If you use a product feed as a datasource, then the column headers are your fieldnames. And if they change, your code doesn't work. Understanding the impact of system changes and communicating them effectively in advance to interested parties should be essential to anyone running an affiliate program.
I don't want to labour a point, but it puts me in mind of that famous quote from Geoffrey Howe: "It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease, only for them to find, as the first balls are being bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain"
Labels: affiliate marketing
Permalink // posted by Rob @ 9:53 AM 
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Ahhh... its a rite of passage into the hallowed halls of affiliate marketing. I still remember the first time a merchant stuffed me over by doing something silly. Makes me misty eyed and nostalgic *sniff*
Agree totally with everything you've said, unfortunately events like this are all too commonplace in affiliate land. The best I can suggest is to go on some kind of deep breathing technique course. That's what I did ;)
Agree totally with everything you've said, unfortunately events like this are all too commonplace in affiliate land. The best I can suggest is to go on some kind of deep breathing technique course. That's what I did ;)
Thanks Kirsty, and I'm glad my post made you come over all nostalgic :-) Deep breathing is something I may have to try. My current anger management technique is to remind myself that however annoyed I am, at least I'll get a free blog post out of it :-)
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