Overstock/bargain sites

Do they work well for you? What are conversion rates?

[Nefig]

Most of you know that there're a few overstock portals out there. And I'm sure there's no need to give an exact URL here for well-known overstock website #1; I'm thinking of getting their datafeed to create 1-2 specialized sites.

The question is:

1. Is conversion rate good/EPC high?
2. Is the datafeed good and clean?

And another question: I've seen a few coupons/price comparison websites, of course they are all automated, but cannot figure out how do they manage to display multiple links to different merchants for one product?

For example, for 10 categories each day they have 20-30 "deals", and each deal (red widget) comes with links and, of course, prices to 10-15 merchants; I'm not talking about big sharks, BizRate or any other major price comparison engines; just one-man websites. As far as I see it, each merchant has it's own datafeed or XML or whatever and unifying those feeds or combinig in one page is not an easy job.

There's no way it's done manually; On the other hand, programming custom CMS for that must be too expensive IMO; if you do not think so, please post how many man hours in your opinion it may take for a good db programmer with ~15 years programming experience.

I understand my question is sort of "what is AM?" but if anybody could throw his 2 cents, it'll be nice.

[Essex_boy]

Good question, I met up with a guy who runs a licensed merchandise wholesaler, his gear is limited numbers in production and heavily promoted.

He offers me all his remaining cases of goods at half wholesale - I flog them for wholesale and double my money.

I think this works because:

A; The gears cheap to buyers - They know how much it should be

B; instantly recognisable to teh public.

c: No longer available in the shops.

Id be wary of of any good deal if if it didnt include the the three steps above.

[Nefig]

Anybody? Conversion rates? If you're shy, you can sticky me :)

Linkshare wants $250 for access to merchants datafeeds, and this overstock.<snip> site provides datafeeds through LInkshare, I have to make a decision, hence the question.

Another question regarding Linkshare datafeeds: does anybody know what "Attribute file" field is? Couldn't google it or find what it is on Linkshare website, and WW search doesn't seem to work for me.