If you haven’t heard of datafeeds but you’re interested in affiliate marketing, you need to take a look. Datafeeds can be used to quickly create a website which you can use to sell products, looking like your own store until the customer decides to buy. The merchant still handles the order processing, of course.

I spent a couple days, however, trying to update a datafeed on my fine jewelry website. The program I was using quite simply would not take the datafeed. I finally figured out, however, that the problem was not in the feed, it was in the program’s ability to take a large feed. I simply had too much data for it to digest.

Now, this was a reasonable size feed, certainly not gigantic. Less than 5000 products. I finally found it would take it in chunks of something under 4000 items, so I broke the feed up and tricked the program into thinking the were separate

Now, this store is not my cleanest effort. I use feeds from too many places, and it’s a bit of a mess. I think my eventual solution is going to be to divide the store up into parts, and use different merchants on different sites, so I can properly test who is converting without being so darned confusing to site visitors. I have some ideas for how to play around with that site so that visitors will get a much better experience. Not going to do it right now, though - it would change the site too much and Valentine’s Day is coming! You don’t mess with a jewelry site so near Valentine’s Day, at least not if you want your search engine rankings to benefit you at all.

Now, I honestly don’t know. Maybe I would have better sales over Valentine’s Day if I redid the site right now. It’s hard to say. But I’d rather not hurry that job, as I’d have to do right now with little more than a month before that holiday. Much better, in my opinion, to face the probability of lackluster sales than to have to redo the site twice. I could be very, very wrong about that, but it’s how I intend to run things. Can’t very well test the theory.