How to Create a Product Data Feed?

E-Commerce E-Commerce Basics Shopping Feeds

This article will explain how to create a feed.

Abstract

Product feeds are csv, tsv, txt, json or xml files that contain product information that is used by marketplaces, shopping engines, and social commerce platforms to display product listings.

Feeditor`s requirements do not restrict or impose feed formats or structure. The recommended format, however, is a simple two dimensional csv.

There are three mainly used formats: delimited (.csv, tsv, etc….), json and xml.

Choose the delimited option when possible. Your second choice should be json, and the third, as last resort – xml.

General requirements

If you create your feed on your server as a result of a long-running query/routine:

1. consider caching the result as a static file (valid for 1 hour) and serving the saved cached file (rather than a live query)

2. For large feeds (query/routine results) – consider compression – your server might have default support for compression of text content. Either implement text compression (on your server) or create an archive, such as .tar.gz, .zip, etc…

3. Consider streaming the content (while generating the rest) if compression is not implementable

4. Encode your content the right way – you should encode the bytes of the query/routine result correctly. Avoid lower/invisible bytes (like bell, etc…)

Feeditor doesn’t have harsh requirements as to restricting or imposing product feed formats. The recommended way though, is a simple two dimensional CSV.

Delimited (.csv, tsv)

1. When possible, include column headers as the first row. Try not to use spaces, commas, or non-ascii characters in the column headers. If the column headers answer this sample regex, you should have fewer issues ^[a-zA-z_-]+$

2. Delimiter – if you are generating the delimited content manually – use TAB as the delimiter – it’s least prone to errors. Otherwise, it’s recommended to use a library/tool provided by the programming platform you are working with. E.g. for python, one example would be pandas DataFrame.to_csv. If you are using a library like pandas – choose either comma (default in pandas) or tab as the output separator. For a manual feed generation + non-standard delimiter (such as ;) – make sure that the number of delimiters is equal across all rows, ensure that empty columns have still padding left (e.g. ;;;) and the delimiter (;) is escaped within regular text (such as title or description).