Data Feed Generator (BETA)

Data Feeds allow you to list your products on shopping portals like Yahoo! Shopping, Google Base, or Shopping.com and in certain affiliate programs. We will call each of these feed users a Publisher of your Data Feed.

Each Publisher requires a different data format. Some are quite simple and align nicely with your CommerceCM catalog while others provide the option to include extra data. The basic format includes your product name, a link to the product image, a link to the product, the description and pricing.

The Data Feed Generator provides a simple and flexible way to create data feeds for some of the common publishers. It is possible to fully automate the process but since the larger publishers include data fields that are not possible to extract from CommerceCM, many merchants have found it to be more effective to fine tune their data feeds and manually upload them.

An automated data feed is a good option if you have a large catalog and if you products all share the same additional Data Feed attributes so those fields can be populated automatically. Please discuss your needs with ideaLEVER and we would be happy to provide an estimate.

If the Data Feed Generator does not have your required format, please provide us with the details and we will try to get the format into a future build. In many cases, an existing format can be rearranged in a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel to get the format you require.

Before you can use the data feeds you must register with the publisher and create your own user account. Registering and developing your strategy is beyond the scope of this document.

The Data Feed Generator can be accessed with the Marketing>Data Feed menu.

The form in the top left is used to create a new Data Feed. The table at the bottom lists existing Saved Queries. In this view here, there are no existing queries.

Creating a new Data Feed

1. Type: This menu lists available types of data feeds available in CommerceCM. The default form is for a standard shopping portal. The form changes for an affiliate program because Affiliate data feeds need to include your account number.
2. RefID: This will append a Referrer ID to every product link. This will allow you to track the visits and sales generated from your Data Feed. You will need to create the RefID in the Referrer ID Manager.
3. Department: The products that appear in you Data Feed are controlled by your catalog Departments and you must select a single Department for each Data Feed but you can create more than one Data Feed of each type but this should be done carefully to avoid duplication.
   
   Using a Department gives you the ability to easily control which products appear on any given Publishers site. Most merchants will create a Datafeed Department that includes all of their active products however you might also want to have a department for each Publisher.
   
   a.  Some Publishers have complex programs where you can bid for positioning and you pay for each click. This can get expensive and these programs can be difficult to manage effectively for hundreds of products. To simplify things, Merchants will only list their most popular products and manage them carefully.
   
   b.  Since many shopping portals are used for price comparison, they tend to be used by price sensitive shoppers in many categories. Merchants using these systems will frequently only list items that they have a price advantage on.
4. Currency: Most Publishers will be expecting USD pricing in the data feeds however more and more are starting to create portals for Euros. There are also some Canadian dollar portals however that market is not very well developed.
5. Language: Most Publishers will require English.
   Clicking Create will create your file and load your Data Feed into the Saved Queries table.

Saved Queries

The listing above is for a Google Data Feed. The specification was created October 16, 2007, and the current file was generated at 5:10:45 PM in the Pacific Time zone. There is no Account ID because this is not an Affiliate Program data feed. You can also see the file name, the Item Count which tells you how many products are in your file, and a link to Regenerate the File, or Delete it.

To use the file, you will need to right mouse click the file name and select “save file as” to save the file to your computer.

Once it has been saved to your computer you should be able to open the file with a spread sheet program like Microsoft Excel. You can then add any additional information not included in the data feed. Your Publisher should be able to provide you with specifications of valid codes for additional fields.

Because it is the most common we will use a sample file from Google Base to discuss some of the additional fields not available to the Data Feed in CommerceCM. When you open your Google file you will likely see the following fields that need further data.

Most Publishers require you to resubmit your data feeds on a regular basis. Depending on the amount of customization in the file, the changes in your catalog, and the requirements of the Publisher, you can either:

1. Upload your previous file if your catalog has not changed and the format contains no date information used to determine the timeliness for the data.
2. Change any expiry date or generated date from your previous file manually and re-upload if there are no catalog changes.
3. Use the Regenerate link to create a new base file to be customized.