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I've been building LiveFeeds (https://www.livefeeds.io/ https://www.livefeeds.io/), a platform for helping online retailers keep their affiliate data feeds and

I've been building LiveFeeds (https://www.livefeeds.io/ https://www.livefeeds.io/), a platform for helping online retailers keep their affiliate data feeds and ad networks up to date. Currently, many affiliates work from data feeds that are only published once or twice a day, leaving them out of sync on prices and stock levels for many hours every day.

teej 9y ago
Ok so - I am your target customer exactly. My team is responsible for generating product feed files to give to agencies and engines. The process is extremely painful and usually ends up wasting the time of up to 10 people in the company for what should be some automated process. And here’s the thing - because it’s revenue generating, finding the budget to pay for your service is super duper easy. So with that in mind, here’s some unsolicited feedback - * I need you to state your limitations up front. How many products can you handle, what is the size of data you can handle? * What platforms do you integrate with? This wasn’t obvious to me after quickly scanning the site * Do you let me dedupe, aggregate, or create new data attributes in your platform?
- danellis 9y ago
  > I need you to state your limitations up front. How many products can you handle, what is the size of data you can handle? We're not in production yet, so we're still testing with some friendly merchants, but the largest dataset we've encountered is 1.3M rows (approx 900MiB of CSV). That's for a mobile phone retailer, and it's essentially the cross product of all the variables in their deals. To answer your other question, for that reason a longer-term goal is to introduce a format for aggregating multiple product options. That requires buy-in, though. > What platforms do you integrate with? This wasn’t obvious to me after quickly scanning the site After talking to some of our potential customers, most of them seem to be lacking in very technical staff. One of the larger ones has a brand new GBP 20M web site that they have no internal control over. For that reason, we've developed a couple of solutions that can be implemented in the web layer instead of the inventory layer. We'd be happy to work with any merchant who wants us to integrate with their e-commerce backend, though; in fact, it makes things a lot easier for us. > Do you let me dedupe, aggregate, or create new data attributes in your platform? We don't do deduping yet (no one has asked for it so far), but we allow you to create new data attributes in your product schema. The primary motivation for this is to generate product IDs for feeds that don't have an explicit ID column, but do have one in, say, the product URL. We'll be extending it as use cases come along, for things like extracting attributes from product titles or descriptions, and fixing up data to meet the requirements of particular ad networks.

teej 9y ago

Ok so - I am your target customer exactly. My team is responsible for generating product feed files to give to agencies and engines. The process is extremely painful and usually ends up wasting the time of up to 10 people in the company for what should be some automated process. And here’s the thing - because it’s revenue generating, finding the budget to pay for your service is super duper easy. So with that in mind, here’s some unsolicited feedback - * I need you to state your limitations up front. How many products can you handle, what is the size of data you can handle? * What platforms do you integrate with? This wasn’t obvious to me after quickly scanning the site * Do you let me dedupe, aggregate, or create new data attributes in your platform?

danellis 9y ago
> I need you to state your limitations up front. How many products can you handle, what is the size of data you can handle? We're not in production yet, so we're still testing with some friendly merchants, but the largest dataset we've encountered is 1.3M rows (approx 900MiB of CSV). That's for a mobile phone retailer, and it's essentially the cross product of all the variables in their deals. To answer your other question, for that reason a longer-term goal is to introduce a format for aggregating multiple product options. That requires buy-in, though. > What platforms do you integrate with? This wasn’t obvious to me after quickly scanning the site After talking to some of our potential customers, most of them seem to be lacking in very technical staff. One of the larger ones has a brand new GBP 20M web site that they have no internal control over. For that reason, we've developed a couple of solutions that can be implemented in the web layer instead of the inventory layer. We'd be happy to work with any merchant who wants us to integrate with their e-commerce backend, though; in fact, it makes things a lot easier for us. > Do you let me dedupe, aggregate, or create new data attributes in your platform? We don't do deduping yet (no one has asked for it so far), but we allow you to create new data attributes in your product schema. The primary motivation for this is to generate product IDs for feeds that don't have an explicit ID column, but do have one in, say, the product URL. We'll be extending it as use cases come along, for things like extracting attributes from product titles or descriptions, and fixing up data to meet the requirements of particular ad networks.