Kolimbo/MyAffiliateProgram Raw Datafeeds 101

Introduction to the MyAp Datafeeds
Feed Locations
The Feed Format
The Columns
Additional Notes
Existing MyAp Merchants

Introduction to the MyAp Datafeeds

Kolimbo is the network platform by Inuvo, Inc. (formerly known as Kowabunga Technologies) for MyAffiliateProgram merchants.

Kolimbo does not provide features like consolidated payments, but it has a merchant directory where you can apply to the merchants program directly through the Kolimbo interface. It also provides a somewhat centralized reporting and features like a store front builder and access to individual affiliate links and creatives for some of the merchants.

Not every program, which uses MyAffiliateProgram as platform is automatically included in Kolimbo. This is an optional feature and the advertiser who operates the program decides if he wants to participate in the Kolimbo network or not. But even if the merchant does not participate, can affiliate still take advantage of some of the benefits of the Kolimbo network for those merchants. Read the last section of this article for more details about that.

The datafeeds provided through the Kolimbo network are very basic and not usable by anybody.

The datafeeds are a by-product of the Kolimbo KBStore feature. Every merchant who supports the KBStore feature also has a raw datafeed, which affiliates can access via the Kolimbo interface or directly, if they know the URL to the raw feed file.

Feed Locations

Return to Network Specific Implementation Guides and Documentations or to Affiliate Datafeeds Resources.

To find out the URL to the raw data feeds of your merchant partners, login to the Kolimbo interface and go to:
"My Link Builder \ Raw Datafeeds". There you will find a list of links to the raw feeds of all your merchants that have one.

The feed location is http://www.kolimbo.com/fd/uniquename.txt
The file name is not easy to guess, but it is not impossible either.

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The Feed Format

Return to Network Specific Implementation Guides and Documentations or to Affiliate Datafeeds Resources.

The feed format is tab-delimited text (column delimiter) with CR+LF (carriage return + line feed or
chr(13) + chr(10)) as line break or row delimiter.

Kolimbo does not enclose alphanumeric values with special characters, such as double quotes; however, I have seen merchant feeds that did enclose the product name and/or the description of the product in double quotes. I even saw feeds where the merchant did enclose some values with double quotes while he did not for all of them. This can be a nuisance so watch out for those.

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The Columns

Return to Network Specific Implementation Guides and Documentations or to Affiliate Datafeeds Resources.

The feeds have only six columns in total. I suggest you treat all of them as character columns, although you might be able to treat the "price" column as numeric value, depending on your import script and application where you import the feeds. The first row contains the column names. Be careful, the names have spaces. The available columns are:

Product Name
Description
URL
Type
Image URL
Price

1. Product Name
This is the name of the product given by the merchant. I mentioned already that Kolimbo does not enclose the values, but that some merchants do it themselves. Some merchant are inconsistent and enclose some values in double-quotes and some not.

2. Description
This column contains the product description. It cannot have line-breaks, because that would indicate a row delimiter for the feed. I also have not seen HTML code (like
) in the descriptions. The description is most of the time very brief, if the merchant provided it, but if it is a bit longer, it will not look pretty without breaking it down into decent size paragraphs. For the description is the same true as for the name. Kolimbo does not enclose any value by double quotes or any other character, but the merchant might sends the data with enclosing double quotes. Some merchants are inconsistent and enclose some values and some not.

3. URL
This is the URL to the product detail at the merchant website. It has already the affiliate coding prepared, but you cannot use it as it is. Look for "?kbid=xxxx" or "&kbid=xxxx" in the URL value and replace the "xxxx" with your affiliate ID for the particular merchant. This is not your Kolimbo ID! You have to use your affiliate ID, which you received for each program individually.

4. Type
Type has usually the value "product" or "Product", but I assume that other values are possible. I have not seen it yet, but values such as "service" or "subscription" would make sense in some cases.

I always ignored this column, because I think that it is more or less useless. A product category instead of the type would have made a lot more sense to me.

5. Image URL
The image URL comes also directly from the merchant. There is no specific rule regarding the size or format of the provided product image, but most merchants send their thumbnail images rather than their large product detail image in the data feed.

6. Price
Has the currency already encoded In the value. This means that you either have to parse it or import as character into most database platforms. The price looks like $99.99 for example, assuming that the product price is in US Dollars.

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Additional Notes

Return to Network Specific Implementation Guides and Documentations or to Affiliate Datafeeds Resources.

There are no columns for the product category or any product properties, such as color, size or anything else like that. It has no information about the manufacturer other than maybe the name of the manufacturer in the product name or product description, no manufacturer part number, UPC, EAN, ISBN (ISBN-13) etc.

While all the mentioned properties that are missing are only an inconvenience, so is the absence of the product ID, which the merchant himself uses to identify a product more than just an inconvenience. If you are lucky, you might be able to parse it from the URL to the product or the merchant was kind enough to add it to his product description for the feed. If this is not the case, you have no other choice than to use the URL to the product itself as unique key to identify a product. You cannot rely on the fact that the product URL is unique though. It can happen that the merchant sends multiple product rows with the same URL. Duplicate rows are technically possible and Kolimbo itself is unable to determine that, due to the missing key column.

The usually tech-savvy Inuvo/Kowabunga folks were not very much forward thinking when they came up with those specifications and it was a real disappointment for me. I contacted them a few years back, but nothing changed. That is even more disappointing to me. They also do not provide an API or anything else to access product data of their merchant-clients.

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Existing MyAp Merchants

Return to Network Specific Implementation Guides and Documentations or to Affiliate Datafeeds Resources.

You can contact Kolimbo and have them add existing merchant to your Kolimbo account, who use My Affiliate Program and where you signed up directly instead of through the Kolimbo interface. This will make the feed URL show up in the interface and reporting data too. However, if it is a merchant who is running on an older version of My Affiliate Program, statistical data will not be updated anymore after the initial integration into the Kolimbo interface. Why this is not possible is beyond me. I would say that it has to do with laziness rather than technical impossibility.

Other Data Feed Guides, Articles and Resources for Affiliates and Advertisers