Creating a product feed
In order for Channel Pilot Pro to assist you in placing your products on various marketing channels, you will need to create a product feed. This is a collection of information regarding your products.
The product feed provides information on every single one of your products such as price, margin or name. A product feed is similar to an excel file in which the rows are products, the columns are data fields and the cells contain the values for a data field and a product.
You can create your product catalog manually or automatically. Many popular shop systems have an export function or offer this as an extra function.
To manually create a product feed, you can for example use Excel. After creating your own product feed, you can upload it to Channel Pilot Pro.
Channel Pilot Pro will read automatically created feeds in http(s) or ftp(s).
We may already offer a ready-to-use implementation for your shop-system. You can take a look at the bottom of the page.
For information on import by file type, click here.
Data fields overview
In the following table, you can find an overview of the most important data fields that you can consign to Channel Pilot Pro. For every field there is an example title, a description, a data type, as well as comments on the required value.
Rules for every value:
The article number has to be unique and cannot be changed!
The names of the data fields cannot be duplicated. Every data field identifier in the product feed must be unique.
You can use either a comma (,) or a dot (.) as decimal separator. The decimal separator can change within a product catalog.
Do not use thousand separators! i.e.: 1,000
Descriptions should not include html tags. Nevertheless, you can eliminate them afterwards with an own data field
This table should help you with your product feed. The more product assortments and the more connected channels you have, then the more data fields you will need to consign.
For example, a shop selling car tires should provide separate data fields for ‘tire type’, ‘tire size’, and ‘season’.
You can also begin with the main settings and then integrate several data fields into your product feed.
Title | Description | Example | Type | Comments |
id | Article number | AN10032 | Text | unique |
title | Article name | Nokia Lumia 930 white | Text |
|
desc | Article description | A wonderful device with… | Text |
|
price | Article price | 399.30 | Floating-point number | large |
price_old | Strike Price | 444.99 | Floating-point number | large |
link | Product URL | Text |
| |
product_number | EAN, ISBN or PZN | 6438158052635 | Text |
|
margin | This article’s margin is 30.50 | Floating-point number | good |
|
manufacturer | Manufacturer | Nokia | Text |
|
manufacturer_no | Article number manufacturer | 12345567 | Text |
|
pic_url | Link to article photo | shop.co.uk/nokia930.png | Text |
|
availability | Availability | In stock | Text |
|
shipping_time | Shipping time (days) | 5 | total number |
|
category | Category | Electronics > Phones | Text |
|
shipping_costs | Shipping costs | 11.21 | Floating-point number |
|
shipping_costs_xy | Shipping costs Payment method xy | 9.99 | Floating-point number | One column per delivery method (if costs differ) |
SHOP IMPLEMENTATIONS
Channel Pilot Pro offers ready-to-use implementations for the following shop systems:
MAGENTO
Channel Pilot Pro's module for Magento is available on Magento Connect Marketplace, for free. It deals with the export of your product catalog, as well as with tracking. For further information, please take a look at our Videotutorials.