Mmmmm... Data!
Datafeeds are a great way to make money as an affiliate. A datafeed is essentially a "dump" of products, including a product picture, name, and description. Included in the feed is a link to the product, which is embedded with your unique affiliate id.

We update our datafeeds once a month with all parent skus for each store. Please note that datafeeds are only functional for three months, after which time you must update feeds - otherwise your links will redirect to PFUSA.

Datafeeds 101
If you are unfamiliar with datafeeds, here are the basics you should know before using them.

We recommend BlueHost as an inexpensive web-hosting solution. They are php-ready and offer MySQL, making them a good choice for datafeed users.

Our datafeeds can be downloaded as either a .xls spreadsheet file, a .txt file, or a .xml feed. You can manually create pages based on the data in the feed, but the real power of datafeeds is that you can use software to automatically generate pages for your website, using data pulled from the spreadsheet. A popular tool for doing this is WebMerge, although due to the fact that we enclose our product descriptions in a <q> tag, WebMerge will not easily work with our feeds. If you are a savvy programmer, you can also store the data in a MySQL database and use a scripting language such as PHP to extract the data from the database and display it on your site. This gives you greater flexibility than using WebMerge or a similar software program, but does require an investment of time and specialized knowledge to accomplish. See option #2 below...

One Small Caveat
One of the drawbacks to using datafeeds is that the content within the feed (product name and description) are identical to those used on the source site (OUR website), and search engines like Google don't like to display web pages containing content that is very similar to that found on other web sites. That means if you use our datafeeds as the only content on your website, Google may not rank your pages very well, because it recognizes the content as being taken from our site.

The best way to avoid this "duplicate content penalty" is to add substantial amounts of content to your website that is unique to your site. And on pages containing a product from a feed, add a paragraph or two of your own, unique content to make the page look as "unique" as possible to the search engine. In fact, we request that you do this so that neither you nor the original merchant site is penalized for having duplicate content.

Notice: All of our datafeeds make use of the <q> tag in order to eliminate duplicate content problems for our product descriptions. Do not remove the <q> tag from the product descriptions. Again, note that WebMerge will not generally work with our feeds because of the <q> tag.

How to Use Them
We offer our datafeeds three different ways:
1. Login and select Tools > Get Data Feeds. You'll be taken to a screen that looks like the one above. From there, simply select the format you prefer (.xls, .txt, .xml), choose a datafeed, and click "Download File." If you go this route, you'll have to download a new feed each month, and you'll need to have MySQL on your server to store the feeds.
2. If you are somewhat familiar with SQL and PHP, ASP, or ColdFusion, we provide you with the code to access all of our datafeeds in real-time, which are stored in our own SQL tables. If you go this route, you'll never have to worry about downloading the latest feed - anytime we update a datafeed, your site will automatically reflect the most recent changes in real-time. Go here for instructions.

Datafeeds are a great way to boost your conversion rates. Take advantage of them.

Get datafeed scripts & table names!