EAN codes for product feeds – It only took 3 years!

Over three years ago we looked seriously at compiling a price comparison portal using product feeds from affiliate networks. No mean feat – and something we deciphered would be impossible unless you employed a large army of people manually mapping products – naturally only to re-map when a merchant changes their product feed structure!

Today Hero (the a4uAwards account manager of the year) announced that Maplin have just added this field at Webgains – Hoorah, big respect!

EAN codes help by offering a stable anchor or key field that’s unique to a certain model number or product, much similar to the ISBN codes found on books – which helped early adopters in affiliate marketing create decent enough book price comparison sites – Book Brain springs to mind.

I’ve actually been away from the product feed area after being disillusioned with sub standard offerings from networks all those years ago, but perhaps merchants liaising with networks can now offer the desired information in a standardised format across all networks.

Whilst innovations such as Shop Window are welcomed, for me and our technical team nothing beats raw data - organised efficiently.

I even remember us trying to get networks together many moons ago to discuss this, I wonder if anything has changed now?