What is a Product Feed and how do I upload it into the platform? (video)

A Product Feed has multiple usabilities in our BusinessLeague platform. Based on it, marketers can take the product feed and use it in price comparisons sites, cashback sites or promotions aggregator sites. Although, it’s not mandatory when launching an affiliate program, product feeds are an important affiliate marketing tool that merchants should provide.

CSV specifications

Our platform supports CSV/TSV files with the following requirements:

• Each single product must be on a new line
• Uses quotation marks ("), single quotes (') or backticks (`) as content delimiter
• Uses commas (,), semicolons (;) , tabs (/t) or pipes (|) as field separator
• The file should be encoded in UTF-8
• The CSV will be added into our platform through a link to the file. You will share a URL with us which we will fetch 3-4 times a day (however the schedule can be adjusted). If you already created a feed for Google Merchant, you can use that same feed in our platform as well.

XML specifications

For the XML files, it is recommended to include all tags, even if they are empty, to ensure that we correctly identify them on our side.

Both RSS and Atom formats are supported.

If you’re using Google Merchant, that feed is fully compatible and can be used without any issues.

Your product feed can contain as much information as you need, which you can easily map to our required and optional fields. 

Data

Our mandatory fields are:

• Title

  • Description: The name of the product.

  • Mandatory: Yes

  • Validation: Maximum 255 character limit.

• Description

  • Description: A text description about the product.

  • Mandatory: Yes

  • Validation: Text and simple HTML tags like <b>, <li>, <ul>, <ol>, <dl>, <dd>, <i>, <u>, \n, <br>

• Sale price

  • Description: Price of product (discounted or not).

  • Mandatory: Yes

  • Validation:

    • Must be a number

    • No thousands separator

    • . used for decimal separator

• Category

  • Description: Category tree.

  • Mandatory: Yes

  • Validation: None specified

• Product URL

  • Description: URL of the product.

  • Mandatory: Yes

  • Validation: Must be in the format http(s)://www.site.com/product-url

• Images

  • Description: Array of image URLs.

  • Mandatory: Yes

  • Validation: URLs separated by comma ,

• Product ID

  • Description: Internal ID of the product.

  • Mandatory: Yes

  • Validation: Must be a number

• Availability

  • Description: If in stock or not.

  • Mandatory: Yes

  • Validation: Accepted values: 0, 1, In Stock, Backorder, Out Of Stock, Preorder

Our optional fields are:

1. Old price

   • Description: The price before discount (if any)

   • Mandatory: No

   • Validation:

     • Must be a number

     • No thousands separator

     • . for decimal separator

2. Brand

   • Description: Product manufacturer.

   • Mandatory: No

   • Validation: Text

3. GTIN

   • Description: Global Trade Item Number (UPC / JAN / EAN / ISBN / ITF-14)

   • Mandatory: No

   • Validation:

     • Greater than 8 characters

     • Less than 14 characters

4. Other data

   • Description: Additional field.

   • Mandatory: No

   • Validation: JSON or YAML format, must be less than 16MB

5. Custom field

   • Description: Additional fields. Can add up to 4.

   • Mandatory: No

   • Validation: JSON or YAML format, must be ≤254 characters

How to upload it in our platform

To upload your feed into the platform, we recommend following the tutorial below: