Product Feed
Last updated
Last updated
The Product Feed makes it possible for your team to share product recommendations with shoppers.
We’ll walk you through each step to set up your Product Feed.
The tool will only work if your Product Feed meets the following criteria:
CSV-format(comma-separated, tab-separated, or pipe-separated values format)
Hosted on a publicly-available URL
Include all required fields (as set out in the ‘Must Have’ fields)
If your Product Feed does not meet these criteria, get in touch with us. If you have already set up your Product Feed, you won’t need to use this tool.
In just a few steps, you can ensure that your feed is being indexed and updated on a regular basis, using whatever schedule works best for you.
To index your Product Feed, you will need access to the Dashboard Settings. If you do not have access, get in touch with your account manager to request access.
1. Go to Settings and click on the ‘Edit’ button. From there, select the Product Feed option in the Settings menu. Here, you will see an overview of the 3 steps to set up your feed. Now you can move into the setup flow.
2. Add the URL for your Product Feed and choose whether it is organized in a comma-separated, tab-separated, or pipe-separated format.
3. Choose how often Virtual Shopping tries to update the Product Feed to the Store App. The frequency should align with how often you update or change your Product Feed so that what product experts and shoppers see during a chat mirrors what appears on the website. You can select an index frequency between 1x and 4x per day and set the time at which they would like the first index.
4. To ensure fields map correctly, choose whether your feed uses decimal points or decimal commas (i.e 100.00 or 100,00) for pricing or whether you use double quote wrapping (i.e “ or ‘) for item descriptions in the Product Feed.
Initial setup is complete! You'll see a message that says: ‘Importing attributes’. If any of the information you input in step 1 needs to be changed, you'll be notified at this stage and pointed back to this first step to make adjustments.
Now it’s time to match the attributes in your Product Feed to Virtual Shopping’s required and pre-defined attributes.
At this stage, you can set up Virtual Shopping to describe particular Product IDs or SKUs differently from the way they appear in your actual Product Feed. Having this flexibility should help you provide the best possible Product Feed experience for product experts – and prevent accidental or incorrect matches.
1. The tool will alert you about the number of attributes that were grabbed from your feed, all of which will be added to drop-downs on the page.
2. Review each attribute field, and select from the drop-down header from the feed that matches the Virtual Shopping attribute.
Once an entry on the dropdown has been used, it cannot be reused for another field.
3. Enter a value for each field marked as ‘required’. You’ll need to enter values for each required field to proceed to the final setup step.
We recommend that you fill out all additional fields, if possible. The more information you can provide, the better the experience will be for product experts and shoppers.
Step 2 is complete! Now you can finish setup by previewing how your Product Feed will appear to product experts.
To finish, you can preview what the Product Feed experience will look like for product experts and shoppers. This makes it easy to see if you will need to change any of the field mappings you made in the previous step.
1. Review the first 9 products using the arrow buttons on the screen to confirm mappings are correct. For each product, you will want to confirm that the product title, price, description, SKU Code, and URL are all correct.
2. Now you can compare what the product preview is displaying against the information displayed on your website. Click on the product URL located at the bottom of the table and open the URL in a new tab, so you can compare.
3. If you need to make any changes, simply head back to Step 2 by tapping the back arrow on the top of the screen.
4. If all fields look correct, select ‘Finish’.
Super! Your Product Feed set-up is complete and its first indexing has begun. Once indexing is complete, you'll receive a confirmation email.
While the feed is indexing, you won’t be able to make any changes to mappings. If you need to make a change, you will be able to do so after receiving your email confirmation that indexing has finished.
After initial setup, if there are issues with your Product Feed feed you will receive alerts on its status. These alerts are there to notify you of any issues so you can quickly take steps to fix them.
