We’re big fans of XL Pharmacy, and we’ve been in periodic contact with them for almost a year now about their plans to introduce a live datafeed for affiliates. With the company unable to produce a feed for such a long while, the only affiliates able to take advantage of datafeed technology have been those who sign up with us and receive our free datafeed — or those who have undertaken the work to produce a custom feed themselves.

Now the wait is over, and new affiliates have a choice: the company is at last producing their own feed in-house, in addition to our long-standing free datafeed.

What do you need to use the new in-house feed, and what does it offer you as an affiliate?

The most important advantage it offers is the capability to place items directly into the customer’s shopping cart at XLP in response to the customer’s having clicked a ‘buy’ link on your site. Affiliates who run sites designed to mimic the functionality of an actual shopfront should find much higher conversions as a result of placing product selections directly into the shopping cart.

In addition to that, the introduction of a datafeed provides all the usual advantages of the technology which we’ve become accustomed to: automatic insertion of up-to-date pricing information in product information web pages, automatic production of entire sites using tools such as WebMerge, etc. Unfortunately for affiliates who don’t have the inclination or the technical expertise to dive into PHP programming, however, the new feeds (accessed via curl in PHP) will be of limited use: exploiting the new in-house datafeed will not just require modification of your existing web pages, but also some significant PHP programming to tap into the feed.

Even though the in-house feed is rather technically limited and cumbersome to use, it’s a start, and it holds significant promise for higher conversions if you make use of the direct-to-cart capability. And, of course, it remains free! So, in our view — which is naturally entirely unbiased — the best course of action for new affiliates interested in making use of datafeeds is to sign up via us (on our XL Pharmacy page) and get hold of both our free and easy-to-use datafeed and the additional feed produced in-house by XLP!