As a Shopify Plus Certified Partner app that boasts over 800 five-star ratings in the company’s app store, Refersion is dedicated to creating the most effective tools possible for our users.
Today, we are taking our platform to the next level with the official launch of our new product feed feature for ecommerce brands using Shopify and Shopify Plus. This is exciting news as it will facilitate a much more transparent and streamlined relationship between merchants, publishers, and affiliates.
As things currently stand, for promoters to procure the necessary information on a brand’s products, either the brand must reach out to them, or they need to conduct independent research on their own. Obviously, this dynamic can create a fair amount of friction.
Refersion’s new product feed feature removes these barriers and opens up new opportunities for ecommerce brands to cultivate a greater number of relationships with affiliates and publishers, thus creating a more extensive and profitable network of advocates.
Moreover, in conjunction with our recently announced Premium Publisher Program, the new product feed feature enables Refersion to offer Shopify and Shopify Plus brands a complete, enterprise-class platform for automated affiliate marketing programs and efforts.
Thus, if your brand is looking to bolster its bottom line and grow to new heights through affiliate marketing, Refersion offers a perfect full-stack solution to forge new partnerships, facilitate transparency, amplify revenue, and accelerate growth.
On that note, let’s go ahead and take a deeper look at our new product feed feature, as well as examine the rewards that both brands and promoters stand to reap from this new offering.
What is a Product Feed?
Brands that have leveraged Google Shopping in the past are likely familiar with the concept of a product feed. For those who are unfamiliar, a product feed is a data catalog that details the various attributes of a product in a merchant’s inventory.
Generally speaking, product feeds contain vital information about product an ecommerce brand offers, including (but not limited to):
- Shop name
- Product brand
- Model
- SKU
- Description
- Size (if applicable)
- Image URL
- External URL
- Price
- Currency
- Availability
In a nutshell, product feeds serve a critical function in enabling data from your online store to be listed on global marketplaces and provided to those promoting your products, which, in this case, is affiliates and publishers.
In fact, in many instances, third-party platforms can require ecommerce brands to possess a product feed in order to feature their products or utilize their services, as is the case with Google Shopping, Amazon, LTK (formerly LIKEtoKNOW.it), and other important online outlets and feed-driven platforms.
Refersion’s Product Feed Feature
To help facilitate the growth of relationships and revenue, Refersion is rolling out a product feed feature that enables brands to generate a feed in our Marketplace, thus providing critical product information to Marketplace publishers and affiliates.
Refersion’s product feed will serve to extract a variety of pertinent product properties and details from an ecommerce brand’s website and make this information available in real-time to relevant partners using the Refersion Marketplace. This process is facilitated via the GraphQL API.
For the uninitiated, GraphQL is a query language that is used to retrieve data from an API. Using this protocol, affiliates and publishers are capable of programmatically crawling a brand’s website, filtering for relevant details, and retrieving the information they need in the form of organized tables.
The attributes that affiliates and publishers can find in a brand’s product feed include many of those listed above, including various listing details, images and image data, product variant data, and more.
As we continue to refine and expand this feature, new functionality will become available, making it a more streamlined, intuitive, and visually-focused tool for users.
The Perks of Refersion’s Product Feed
As it stands, the product feed feature provides considerable value to merchants, affiliates, and publishers alike.
Let’s take a detailed look at the perks received by these groups.
Product Feed Benefits for Merchants
Where ecommerce brands are concerned, there are substantial benefits to be reaped from utilizing Refersion’s Product Feed.
First, as touched upon earlier, the integration of this feature provides merchants with a necessary element for forging new partnerships with the most prominent and profitable content publishers, such as those taking part in Refersion’s Premium Publishers program. The fact is that many of these platforms rely on product feeds for scalability and as a core component of their affiliate marketing strategy.
This means that Refersion’s Product Feed opens the door for new, highly prosperous relationships that can help exponentially increase traffic and sales to an ecommerce brand’s website. Currently, ecommerce brands that work with Refersion’s top content publishers generate an annual average of $2 million in new revenue. This powerful new feature is poised to increase that figure.
At the same time, this also eliminates potential issues, such as publishers promoting out-of-stock or discontinued merchandise, which can reflect negatively on both merchants and publishers.
On the affiliate side of things, when these folks have accurate, up-to-date product information for a brand, the chances of elevating traffic, conversions, and sales increase significantly. Additionally, just as with major publishers, a greater level of ease and efficiency means that ecommerce brands are likely to grow their network of affiliates by a considerable margin.
Outside of mere opportunity, there is greater efficiency to be had through the product feed as well. Using this feature, merchants can automate the sharing and receiving of product data, thus streamlining organizational workflows, eliminating superfluous tasks, and reducing the complexity of a company’s automated affiliate marketing program.
Product Feed Benefits for Publishers and Affiliates
On the publisher and affiliate end of things, Refersion’s product feed integration offers just as many perks. The first and most notable of which is a significant decrease in the amount of effort than is required for procuring product information from merchants. Thanks to the product feed, publishers and affiliates can simply query Refersion’s marketplace for the necessary data instead of needing to reach out to the merchant directly. Naturally, this perk has several downstream consequences, all of which are positive.
As a result of the transparency cultivated via real-time product feeds, publishers and affiliates can react and pivot appropriately to new product releases and inventory changes. This also means that publishers no longer need to be concerned that they might be promoting discontinued products.
This is a critical point given that ecommerce brands are continually updating their product catalogs with new offerings, phasing out underperforming products, and rotating seasonal items. By providing publishers and affiliates a direct line to up-to-date product information, they can better understand a brand’s product catalog, organize their promotional efforts more effectively, and promote products at scale.
In a nutshell, Refersion’s product feed simplifies and clarifies the transfer of product information from merchants to publishers and affiliates, thereby reducing friction and complexity while enabling all parties to enhance performance across the board.
Scaling Your Brand with Refersion’s New Product Feed Feature
Refersion’s new Product Feed feature has been developed with the aim of enabling Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants to scale their affiliate programs by cultivating new partnerships, forging new relationships, and growing their network in a way that will enable a far greater ROI from their affiliate marketing efforts.
As a result of this implementation, merchants, publishers, and affiliates stand to reap significant gains in efficiency and annual earnings.
Reach out today to discover how to accelerate your Shopify brand’s growth with Refersion’s Product Feed!
