From what I can see, mobile phone merchants frequently update their deals and tariffs, perhaps more so than most other sectors. This means as an affiliate you often need to download a product feed and then put it up on your site or update your database. Ok, you could look at automating that process with some scripts but isn't there a better way? Web services, or live XML feeds are a great way to put merchant data on your website without having to go through the rigmarole of downloading/uploading product feeds.

Live XML feeds seem to be quite common in the travel vertical, but I'm not aware of any merchants in the Mobile Phone vertical offering this - I think they should. If there are any who are already doing it, please use the comments and let me know who's doing it.

Speaking of XML feeds, the one I use the most is for hotel information from Laterooms who I promote through their independent program. It would be really nice to see my stats but their control panel has displayed an error for well over a week and they haven't replied to email about it. I guess they have a problem and don't have the resource to fix it? Maybe sometimes it pays to go through a network after all...

Labels: laterooms, moan, mobile phone, xml