Affiliate Data Feeds & Example of YourStoreWizards

As I was looking for a coder to help one of our clients (her store is running on Yahoo Merchant Solutions) put together an affiliate product feed, I ran across a YourStoreWizards’ shopping feed service. I must admit, I have never heard of them before, and was hesitant to recommend them, but I did mention this solution to the client as one of the options she may want to look into.

Yesterday I got an email from her which read: “YourStoreWizards has been so helpful! I would highly recommend them for Yahoo stores.” It is not in my rule to endorse any product (or service) in my blog unless I have personally tried it, but this particular merchant’s satisfaction got me intrigued and I asked her to elaborate on what exactly made her so happy. She wrote back:

I found them to be very attentive to my needs and very responsive in addressing any issues. We were literally emailing back and forth all day yesterday, making custom adjustments to finalize the feed. I was impressed with how they took the time to explain everything and explain how to do things in detail (not just related to the feed but also for Yahoo store functions). They answered all questions promptly and in detail and didn’t make me feel badly for asking them. I also found them very knowledgeable on Yahoo store programming and because of that, they could easily customize programming to my needs.

There are two lessons we can learn from this:

1) Merchants with Yahoo stores who are getting into affiliate marketing may also find the solution offered by YourStoreWizards of help. They help merchants put together feeds for such affiliate networks as ShareASale, Commission Junction, Google Affiliate Network, and several other ones. In addition, they also sell a solution for affiliate programs run on multiple networks, or an “affiliate program duplicate transaction removal script” [details here]. Of course, if you have access to a coder that can build a custom script for you (prices for these may vary from $50 to $250), you may want to go via an alternative route, but this seems to be a good solution to keep in mind too.

2) Customer service and technical support are extremely important components in merchant/advertiser-supplier relationships. I am sure it is not just me, but other affiliate program managers and merchants are also frequently struggling to get their questions answered (and receive quality resolutions) by affiliate networks and other solution providers. In many cases, success (or failure) of an affiliate program is fully dependent on the quality of these two components.

Disclaimer: The above opinion is based entirely on one given merchant’s experience with one give solution provider, and is free of any monetary or other types of extrinsic motivators.