Merchant Feeds question: How hard is to set them up?

thinking of using them on my site

[walkman]

How hard is to download them from CJ, Linkshare etc. (is it automated) and how hard is it to setup a program (for the average programmer) to display them with by prices, categories, discounts, etc.

I know I might have to pay for them at least initially.

[disgust]

I'm probably a "below adverage" programmer, and I just started playing with datafeeds. in a matter of hours I had a large feed (tens of thousands of products) displaying to my satisfaction. I'm still tweaking it.

I'd really suggest the program Navicat. it won't do all the work for you by any means, but it's a great, automated way of converting a lot of formats into sql. from there I just uploaded the db to my server, loaded it, and tweaked the way it displays.

[MovingOnUp]

It's easy to use them, but difficult to use them properly. It's not hard at all to create a ton of duplicate content that adds no value. The challenge is coming up with a way to use the data that provides value to your site visitors and isn't filtered by Google as dupliate content. You'll have a hard time being successful with datafeeds until you overcome both of those hurdles.

[walkman]

I will not use them separately. Will only use them to supplement existing pages. For example show a few products from each store, random products with price drops etc. I know about the dupe penalty really well ;), and the individual product pages will be blocked via robots.txt and apache rewrite.

do you download the files nightly (how's that done?), or are the stored at their servers? The prices and product list changes fairly often I assume.

Finally: where can I get a sample file to show to the programmer?

thanks again,

[disgust]

cj delivers all feeds you request weekly. don't know about linkshare. again, I don't know linkshare too well, but with cj the feeds can be delivered in a variety of formats. the "sample file" would be different depending on format you decide to have delivered.

personally I wouldn't pay a programmer to convert any datafeed to sql. there's software out there to do that for you. :)

[walkman]

thanks disgust,
the paying thing is to integrate into my php script that runs the site and change things around, but most importantly to find a way to automate the process of downloading, converting and displaying. It would suck if I had to manually do this (minus displaying) every week for 5-100+ stores.