It is time for another guest blogger from the team so let me introduce Antonello, who is
Integration Solutions/Product Support Manager and has worked with CJ just over four years now…
Antonello is going to tell you about the world of Self-Serve product feeds.
We’ve had some feedback from our publishers about making use of the publisher self-serve products feeds and so we created a step-by-step help guide on how setup and manage these directly from within your publisher account.
Publisher Self-Serve product feeds have been available to publisher for a few months now, however it may not be particular obvious where these can be setup and accessed. These are found under the Account -> Services tabs.
Once you have clicked on the above button, you will be presented with the first setup screen. Simply follow each step as described below:

There are several ways you can receive a self-serve subscription. CJ recommends that you choose CJFTP/CJHTTP options, so that files are hosted on CJ’s servers. These are the easiest options.
Once the first CJFTP or CJHTTP subscription is setup, you will receive an email with the details on how to access the CJ FTP or CJ Web servers. The emails will contain your username and passwords.
Keep these somewhere safe! You will need these details to obtain your feeds.
CJ can also deliver feeds to your FTP server, for your convenience:

Or, less commonly, you could choose CJ to upload files to your Web Server:

It is possible for publishers to receive feeds by Email, however this option is not suitable when choosing “All My Advertisers Product Catalogs” option. It maybe utilised on subscriptions containing a single feed, where you know the feed supplied by the advertiser is very small size. This is due to most email systems not able to handle large files, hence this delivery method is not recommended.
Once subscriptions are created, the screen below will show you a summary of what has been setup:

You can view each subscription to have more details, such as number of products available in each feed, and when the feed was last updated by the advertiser:

Syntax of Feed URLs:
http://datatransfer.cj.com/datatransfer/files/<PUBLISHER_CJ_ACCOUNT_NO>/outgoing/productcatalog/<SUBSCRIPTION_ID>/<AdvertiserName-ProductCatalogName>.<ext>.gz
As an example, assuming the following:
The advertiser is: “lastminute.com”
The feed is called: “LastMinute Hotel Products”
Your CJ publisher account: “12345678”
Your CJ Subscrption ID is: “98765”
The full feed URL, will be:
XML
http://datatransfer.cj.com/datatransfer/files/12345678/outgoing/productcatalog/98765/lastminute_com-LastMinute_Hotel_Products.xml.gz
CSV, PIPE or TAB
http://datatransfer.cj.com/datatransfer/files/12345678/outgoing/productcatalog/98765/lastminute_com-LastMinute_Hotel_Products.txt.gz
IMPORTANT: Do note that every space or “.” characters in the Advertiser Name and Product Catalog Name are replaced by a “_” characters, when CJ builds the feed URL.
It is therefore possible to easily work out what the feed URL will be, providing you know the Advertiser Name, and Product Catalog name you wish to use.
Alternatively, you can simply setup the self-serve subscription, and wait for the notification email to be delivered to you for the first time, this will tell you exactly the URL structure for that product feed. The below is an example notification email you will receive when an advertiser updates their feed:

Hope that has been useful. If you have any questions just email admin@cjblog.co.uk