Affiliate Datafeed Database - The Guts
Everything up to this point regarding a database driven affiliate website has been warm up. Now the gloves come off.
Doing It Right From The Start
If I was only going to build one database driven website and I would never publish another piece of code to the world wide web, then I wouldn't of spent so much time designing the database structure.
It's kind of like putting down a solid foundation before framing the house. Nobody really cares what the foundation looks like until there is a crack in the concrete. Same thing with a database, nobody cares until something breaks.
With that in mind, I designed the database to be the "Swiss Army knife" of databases. Rugged, dependable, and flexible enough to handle any situation.
Pour The Concrete
Once the framework is in place - once the database design is complete - then pouring the concrete is easy.
Type in the variables decided upon and presto, out comes a ready-to-go database. An empty database, but one ready to go.
Frame It Up
Once the database is in place, time to fill it up.
This is when a PHP script that opens the datafeed, breaks it into pieces, and puts the pieces in its place comes in handy.
Once the PHP script is run, you have a database filled with products ready to be sold.
See for yourself.
The condensed version of 2 hours of programming and testing is shown in this affiliate database video.
March 9th, 2008 06:57
This is looking really interesting Dave!
There are a few people making datafeeds popular at the moment - I am sure yours will be effective.
March 9th, 2008 13:30
Hi Dave,
You make it look so easy! I've always found PHP and MySQL databases a complete minefield!
Looking forward to seeing the finished site.
Chris
March 9th, 2008 14:57
@Chris,
I wish it was easy! What I explained above and showed in the video took a couple hours to figure out - not to mention the years of experience to get there.
Dave
March 9th, 2008 20:03
One challenge is that all datafeeds are not equal and each datafeed will need to be input into your database structured numbering system. But if you can get 3,000 plus products from one vendor as fast as you did in the video, then this shouldn't be a major issue.
One thing you did that is important is to not show "Discontinued" or "Out of Stock" products. So how can you automate an update system with each datafeed so products that change status with "In Stock / Out of Stock / Discontinued / etc." will then display or be removed from the website?
Will your progam allow you to build multiple databases of products from various vendors and then extract certain types of products from various vendors and display just those products on one website?
In other words, is your Garden website showing products from many different vendors' datafeeds or is your Garden website displaying products from just one vendor?
March 9th, 2008 21:09
@Brian,
You bring up some good points.
As it is right now, the garden datafeed has ~1400 products that are "instock". That doesn't mean that we can't use the outofstock sites - consider it "filler" material that can be scattered throughout the site to make the site unique to other related sites.
Since this is the first pass of building a database site with this feed - it will only accommodate one feed. I'm working on setting it up such that the structure works with other products from ShareASale, http://www.linktator2.com/share , as they provide a common format for their datafeeds.
With that said, the feed I have is the only one I found for the gardening niche ...
Dave