Extended Data Feeds: Google Merchant, Meta, Pinterest

A Google Merchant Center feed is set up once — with column rules and a category map. No need to create features and fill them in product by product.

What the stock export cannot do

The stock “Data feeds” add-on assembles a file from product fields, features and options. Google, meanwhile, wants data the catalog usually does not hold: its own category out of a 5,600-entry catalogue, the brand in a column of its own, a flag saying whether a barcode exists, the condition of the goods, and the size and colour of every variation.

The stock answer is to create features and fill them in by hand for every product. On a catalog of a few thousand items that is a week of work, and every new delivery means doing it again. This add-on removes that work entirely.

Column rules

A feed column is described by a chain of rules: where to take the value from, under what condition, and what to do with it. The chain is walked from the top, and the first rule that yields a non-empty value wins.

A source can be a product field, a feature, a constant, a template with placeholders, the variation's own value, a Google category from the map, or a calculated value. A condition limits a rule to part of the catalog: a category, a price or stock range, a feature value. Transformations bring the result into the shape a platform accepts — strip HTML, truncate on a word boundary, append a currency, validate a barcode's check digit.

Set up once for the whole catalog. A new product is picked up on its own.

The Google category map

Shop categories are matched against Google's not product by product but on the catalog tree, and the value is inherited downwards. Map “Shoes” and every subcategory under it is covered.

• automatic matching by name covers between half and three quarters of the tree and marks each proposal with a similarity percentage — a draft, not a decision;
• inheritance removes the need to map the leaves: the branches are enough;
• export and import as a spreadsheet — when the map is easier to work through in a table editor;
• a coverage counter says at once how many categories are still without a value.

Seven ready platforms

A feed is created for a platform: it sets the columns, their order, the rule chains and the file name.

Variations the way Merchant Center expects them

Merchant Center expects every variation as a separate product with its own price, its own stock and its own size and colour, with all the variations of one model tied together by a shared item_group_id. The parent should not be sent: it would arrive as a duplicate with no price.

The add-on adds a “variations and products without variations” mode — the right one for Google — and fills size, colour, material and pattern from the “this variation's own value” source: no feature needs naming, because in different product groups it can be a different one.

Warehouse stock and regional feeds

The stock export reports a combined total. For a shop that ships from several cities that is wrong: an item that is out of stock in one city still reaches that city's campaign as available.

A feed is given a stock slice: warehouses ignored, the total across storefronts, the warehouses of one storefront, a shipping destination, or selected warehouses. The slice affects both the stock column and the calculated availability. For Google's local feeds a store-code field is added to the warehouse record.

Checked before you send

The “What Merchant Center will reject” report goes through every product of the feed and shows what the problem is, how many products it touches, and examples linking to their records. The same things Google checks, but the answer arrives at once instead of a day after submission.

Next to it, a preview of the first feed rows exactly as they will leave.

Delivering the feed, and watching it

• a permanent address with a key — Google fetches the feed itself, no FTP. The key belongs to one feed and is replaced with one button;
• a schedule per feed: hourly, every three or six hours, once a day at a chosen hour, or weekly. One command goes into cron;
• an XML file next to the table — for platforms that take only XML;
• a letter when the feed shrinks: an export is compared with the one before it, and losing a third of the rows sends a letter. A feed almost never breaks with an error — part of the catalog simply stops arriving;
• an export history with a change column: when the feed fell and by how much.

Moving a setup between shops

The feed's whole rule set is available as text. That helps when a couple of dozen rules need changing at once, or when a finished setup has to move to another shop: copy the text, paste it there, save. If a single line is written wrongly, nothing is saved — the add-on names the line number and what is wrong with it.

Compatibility