A Product Feed is fundamentally a file that holds a list of attributes and other data about the products available on your online store. Typically, it includes different fields such as product title, price, image, description, product identifier, size, and any other necessary attributes.

Product feeds are used to create a Catalog of your products in Flowbox. This Catalog is then used to assign products to collected posts.

Product Feed formats

Flowbox supports Product Feeds in two formats: .XML and .CSV.

Keep in mind that you cannot upload the file directly to Flowbox. Instead, you need to host it elsewhere, typically on your website, and use the file's URL to generate the Catalog.

If you are going to use the Product Feed for Ratings & Reviews, please make sure that it includes the <gtin> and <mpn> attributes.

.XML

The feed in this format is typically generated by automated feed provider systems or web servers. To work with Flowbox, your XML feed needs to be based on Google's RSS 2.0 specification.

There are 5 mandatory attributes that each <item> must have:

ID-attribute (<id>).
Other IDs can be used, but must be added in addition to the <id> attribute.
These are <gtin>, <mpn> or <item_group_id>.
Product title (<title>).
Link to product (<link>).
Product image link (<image_link>).
Price (<price>).

Here is an example of the structure of a feed containing one product:

<xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"> 
<rss xmlns:g="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0" version="2.0 "> 
<channel> 
<title>Your Shop</title>
<link>Link to your website</link> 
<description>Product feed for Flowbox</description>
 <item>
  <g:id>12345-01</g:id>
  <title>Lovely cup in blue</title>
  <description>A lovely coffee cup in the color blue</description>
  <link>Link to the product on your website</link> 
  <g:image_link>Link to the product image</g:image_link> 
  <g:price>29.00 EUR</g:price>
  <g:google_product_category>Coffee cups > Lovely coffee cups</g:google_product_category>
  <g:brand>Lovely</g:brand>
 </item>
</channel>
</rss>

Other attributes, even though not mandatory, can enhance what you can do with the Flows or display additional information. For example:

The product_type (<product_type>) attribute is something we recommend adding to your feed in order to add tags to your products. Every tag should be separated by a '>' (eg: ‘Womenclothing > tshirt’), and can be used to automatically tag the product with 'womenclothing' and 'tshirt'.

For more information, please ask your Customer Success Manager about it.

Values in certain attributes of your product feed, like the title, product description, product type... might contain non-valid XML characters (e.g.: <, >, &, ', ") that will require the value to be enclosed in a CDATA field, otherwise the import will fail.

.CSV

If you can't auto-generate an .XML file, you can manually upload your products or services information to a spreadsheet app.

A .CSV Product Feed must have the same mandatory and optional attributes as an .XML Feed (see above).

Note: It is crucial that the attributes are named accordingly to Google’s product data specification. For example ‘Id’ can be represented as <g:id> for .XML feeds and <id> or 'id' for .CSV feeds – attributes which are not specified in the link provided above or attributes with mistyped names, e.g. <vendor_ID> will not work.

Once you have created your feed, you'll need to export it. Create the feed in Google Sheets, where you can use the 'Publish to web' function to generate a link that you'll use to generate the Catalog in Flowbox. Make sure to select "comma-separated values (.csv)" from the dropdown list:

Additional shopping feeds: adding products to Flowbox for different markets (regions) containing different languages and currencies

By adding multiple catalogs, you can also show products in different languages and currencies depending on the customer's region. You will need to provide us with a Product Feed for each of the markets. Flowbox supports a multitude of regions, languages, and currencies.

These feeds will need to have the following attributes adapted:

Product link: Your site most likely has region and/or language parameters in its URL to indicate what language/region the site is for. Example - webshop.com/en, webshop.com/se and webshop.com/de. Each different language/region catalog needs to have the language/region parameter in every product URL.
Currency: If you have markets with other currency than your own, it needs to be specified in its corresponding product catalog.
Price: it might differ depending on market and currency.
Product title: different language, different title.

The rest of the attributes should contain the same data regardless of what market it's used for.

When adding these additional Catalogs, you'll have to choose a locale to identify each one of them. When embedding a Flow on your site, the locale property will tell Flowbox what Product Catalog to retrieve the data from.

Working with product variants

If you have different variants of the same product (e.g.: color, size...) and you want to be able to assign a specific variant to a post, each variant must have its unique identifier, be it 'id', 'mpn' or 'gtin'.

When importing a Product Feed using either of these identifiers as "product identifier", every variant will be available in your Product Catalog.

However, if you have no preference for which variant to assign to a post, you can use 'item_group_id' as the "product identifier." When importing with this identifier, only the last variant with the same 'item_group_id' value from the Product Feed will be created in the Product Catalog.

Want to show discount prices for your products?

If you are planning to run promotional campaigns or give special offers to your customers during a specific period of time, you can easily update the fixed prices of products displayed in Flowbox to discountesd prices. To do so, include the attribute <sale_price> in the previously imported Product Feed in Flowbox and configure what price to show in the Flow's settings. It is advisable to leave the original <price> field unchanged and introduce a new attribute with the discounted price value. This approach allows you to display both the original <price> (struck through) and the <sale_price> side by side.

Check out this article to learn more about how you can display sale prices and style badges in Flowbox.

More about <sale_price> attribute for shopping feeds can be found here: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324471?hl=en

How to add a Product Catalog to Flowbox