There have been some interesting moves by the affiliate/performance marketing networks over the last week - just in time for the busy months of November and December.

ShareASale.com this week launched its Gift Cards Database, which enables merchants to upload creatives directing consumers to specific landing pages for gift cards. Like ShareASale’s Deals Database, the new feature allows affiliates to access the gift card creatives from inside their affiliate interface, as well as through RSS feeds and downloadable databases.

The suggestion for this new feature at ShareASale came at the company’s annual Think Tank event in San Diego less than two week ago. Talk about an action item. SAS CEO Brian Littleton and his team delivered this new functionality as quickly as possible to help merchants and affiliates with the rapidly approaching holiday season. Get more information about the Gift Card Database.

Admitting some “intermittent challenges” with presentation and performance of the data in its reporting systems, LinkShare also rolled out some improvements as it prepares to handle increased transaction volume for the holiday shopping season.

LinkShare has focused on a few key areas including account access and data quality. The company says it resolved a database problem that was preventing user access to its systems during peak usage times. That downtime contributed to inconsistent data in LinkShare’s reporting systems. The company claims that with the data access issues resolved many of the reporting issues will also be resolved. Over the next few weeks, LinkShare says it also expects to fix some inconsistencies in the data in its SynergyAnalytics and improve the performance of its Traditional Reporting.

In addition, in 2008 LinkShare has made significant investments to its systems including replacing its data center networks, reinforcing its database systems, upgrading its ad and click servers, assigning additional servers to existing services to allow for increased capacity and automated fail-over, and installing a new software system to monitor and report on performance.

I was also thrilled to see that LinkShare’s blog got a new lspiffy look and that the company is on Twitter.