Affilinet Integration

Like other affiliate networks, Affilinet's model depended on advertisers supplying an accurate, current product feed: a structured file listing every product along with its price, image, and landing-page URL, which participating publishers pulled into their own comparison sites, deal listings, and content pages to promote. A feed the network could parse correctly determined which products publishers could actually advertise on a merchant's behalf; a stale or broken feed was, in practice, the most common reason a merchant's offers quietly stopped appearing in publisher-run listings.

That underlying need hasn't gone away — it has simply moved. Because Awin is the documented legal and operational successor to Affilinet, any advertiser or publisher relationship that used to run through Affilinet's feed infrastructure is now handled through Awin's own product feed system. If a contract, dashboard reference, or account manager still uses the name "Affilinet," the feed in question needs to reach Awin's platform to have any effect today.

Affilinet itself no longer publishes or maintains an independent feed specification — its historic Feed Configurator and feed infrastructure were absorbed into Awin's product feed system after the 2018 merger. Rather than invent a defunct spec, this section describes the format that is actually in use today, per Awin's own current documentation, since that is where this feed relationship now lives.

1. CSV, delimited by a comma, tab, or pipe character, encoded in UTF-8 (optionally with a byte-order mark).
2. TSV and plain TXT files, consistently delimited and UTF-8 encoded.
3. XML, with each product represented as its own node.

Files can optionally be compressed as .zip or .gz, and must be hosted at a URL the platform can reach without authentication so it can be picked up automatically on a schedule.

The table below reflects the field names and requirement status documented for the platform that today processes feeds that would once have been submitted to Affilinet directly. Field names are shown in both their XML tag and CSV column form, since both are documented.

Seven fields — product ID, product name, description, price, image URL, product URL, and merchant category — are documented as the mandatory minimum for a feed to be usable; everything else listed is optional enrichment.

1. Because Affilinet has no independent platform left to connect to, first confirm with your account contact whether your affiliate relationship is now managed directly under Awin — this determines exactly where the feed needs to land.
2. In Feedance, build a feed export mapped to the required fields listed above (pid, name, desc, price, imgurl, purl, category), in CSV, TSV, or XML format, encoded in UTF-8.
3. Host the Feedance-generated feed at a stable URL, or export it as a compressed .zip or .gz file if that's what your account setup expects.
4. Register that feed URL inside the platform that now manages the relationship (Awin's advertiser dashboard, as the legal successor to Affilinet), where it can be scheduled for automatic, recurring pickup.
5. After the first pull, check the import status to confirm the required fields mapped correctly before relying on the feed for live publisher promotions.

No single mandated refresh interval is published, but the successor platform's own product feed documentation is specific about what happens if a feed is left alone entirely: a feed that goes unmodified for three years is automatically deleted, and a 90-day warning email is sent before that deletion takes effect. In practice, that three-year window is a hard outer limit, not a target — a feed only touched once every few years will show stale prices and out-of-stock items to publishers long before it's ever actually removed.

As a general best practice independent of any one network's specific rules, feeds carrying prices or stock levels that change often are best refreshed at least daily; catalog-only data with slower-changing attributes can run on a weekly cadence, but should still be re-uploaded well within that three-year expiry window so it never lapses by neglect.

The successor platform's own product feed documentation highlights a small number of specific, recurring problems:

These are general product-feed best practices, not specific claims documented by Affilinet or its successor platform — apply them as sensible defaults regardless of destination:

1. Keep product identifiers stable across updates. Changing an ID between feed refreshes can look like a delete-and-recreate to downstream systems rather than a simple update.
2. Populate brand and standard identifiers (EAN, UPC, MPN) wherever you have them; enrichment fields consistently make catalog matching and category placement more accurate, even when a network lists them as optional.
3. Keep price and availability values in the feed in sync with the live product page at all times — stale merchandising data is a common source of publisher trust issues in affiliate programs.
4. Write plain, descriptive product names and descriptions rather than reusing raw internal SKU text, since publisher-facing listings are typically generated directly from these fields.
5. Automate the refresh schedule instead of relying on manual re-uploads — this is the most common general cause of feeds quietly going stale until a network warning, or a drop in publisher-driven sales, draws attention to it.

Is Affilinet still an active, independent affiliate network?
No. Affilinet GmbH was legally merged into Awin AG on 1 October 2018, following a merger process that began in 2017. Affilinet is no longer an independent company or platform, and its old domain, affili.net, now redirects to awin.com.

If my contract or account still references "Affilinet," where does my feed actually need to go?
In practice, to the platform that is Affilinet's documented legal and operational successor, which now runs the feed infrastructure that Affilinet's advertisers and publishers previously used.

What feed formats are accepted?
CSV, TSV, and TXT (comma, tab, or pipe delimited, UTF-8 encoded), and XML, optionally compressed as .zip or .gz — this reflects the current product feed specification of the platform now handling this relationship.

What are the mandatory fields?
Product ID, product name, price, image URL, product URL, merchant category, and description are documented as the required minimum.

What happens if I stop updating my feed?
An unmodified feed is automatically deleted after three years, with a 90-day warning email sent first.

Can Feedance connect directly to "Affilinet"?
Not as a separate destination — Affilinet has no independent platform left to connect to. Feedance can instead generate a correctly formatted feed for the platform that now actually handles this relationship, so nothing that used to depend on Affilinet gets left behind.