Product feed requirements

A product feed is a text-file usually in the .xml or .csv format. It describes all the products in an eCommerce shop, including info such as name, brand, category, etc.

Confect works by pulling these feeds once an hour and running automations based on changes in the feed. For example, if a price changes, the product feed automations will be updated to use the newest price.

Confect follows the Google Shopping Product Data Specification, and all fields listed here are supported. Confect additionally also supports custom fields, so any field not listed in the specification will still be available for filtering inside Confect.

Field requirements

Confect requires relatively few fields to function, but some extra fields are recommended for the best experience.

Minimum requirements

Recommended extra fields

Formats

Confect currently supports product feeds in the following listed formats.

NOTE: Prefixing fields inside a namespace, for example having fields like “g: the title” is very common in Google Shopping fields, and this is optionally supported.

Atom 1.0 XML

https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/160593

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feed
    xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
    <entry>
        <id>ABC-123</id>
        <title>A nice blue shirt</title>
        <category>Shirts</category>
        <link>https://link-to-the-product</link>
        <image_link>https://link-to-the-image</image_link>
        <brand>Justin Blue</brand>
        <price>65 USD</price>
        <sale_price>30 USD</sale_price>
    </entry>
</feed>

RSS 2.0 XML

https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/160589

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <item>
      <id>ABC-123</id>
      <title>A nice blue shirt</title>
      <category>Shirts</category>
      <link>https://link-to-the-product</link>
      <image_link>https://link-to-the-image</image_link>
      <brand>Justin Blue</brand>
      <price>65 USD</price>
      <sale_price>30 USD</sale_price>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

CSV

Confect supports most types of CSV and automatically detects the delimiter. It is, however, recommended to use a comma (,) or a semicolon (;).

Comma-separated:

id,title,category,link,brand,price,sale_price,image_link
ABC-123,A nice blue shirt,Shirts,https://link-to-the-product,Justin Blue,65 USD,30 USD;https://link-to-the-image

Semi-colon-separated:

id;title;category;link;brand;price;sale_price;image_link
ABC-123;A nice blue shirt;Shirts;https://link-to-the-product;Justin Blue;65 USD;30 USD;https://link-to-the-image

Images in the feed

As of right now, Confect will only remove the background and use the primary image in the feed. It is therefore important that your primary image is the one you wish to use in Confect.

Additional images

Confect does, however, support inserting additional_images from the feed in a design, just with the original background not removed. This is still useful in a lot of cases.

To include more images in your feeds, refer to the following examples:

XML

In XML one just includes as many additional_image_link as you want. The order is important if you have specific images in specific locations.

  <id>1</id>
  <name>Nice Dress</name>
  <image_link>https://image1</image_link>
  <additional_image_link>https://image2</additional_image_link>
  <additional_image_link>https://image3</additional_image_link>

CSV

To include additional images in CSV, separate each extra image in the “additional_image_link” field with a comma. If your CSV delimiter is "," as well, you need to double quote the field.

id,name,image_link,additional_image_link
1,Nice Dress,https://image1,"https://image2,https://image3"

More info

For more information about including additional images in product feeds, please refer to the Google Merchant Center Definition.