Did you know that you could showcase your products and redirect visitors to the product page right from the Flow gate view, even if you do not have a shopping feed or an ecommerce store? 👀
The answer lies in creating a simple, manual shopping feed.
Take a look at Faceland and Heytens: they have made their products and services very visible on their homepages thanks to Flowbox!
If a CTA button is not enough, let’s use a manual shopping feed to add product images and links to product pages in the Flow gate.
What is a manual shopping feed?
A shopping feed is fundamentally a file that holds a list of attributes and other data about the products available on your website. Typically, it includes different fields such as product title, price, image, description, product identifier, size, and any other attributes that are needed.
You can easily create a manual shopping feed based on this definition for the aforementioned purpose. You do not need to sell products online to take advantage of this feature. And it works exactly like how it sounds; you just manually upload the required information to a spreadsheet program such as Google Sheets and then use the 'Publish to web' function in order to be able to use it in Flowbox.
What is mandatory?
There are a few mandatory attributes that have to exist in the feed in order for Flowbox to read it properly. These are:
ID-attribute (<id>, <gtin>, <mpn> or <item_group_id>).
Product title (<title>).
Link to product (<link>).
Product image link (<image_link>).
<product_type> is not mandatory - but it is something we recommend (see the bottom of this article for more info about auto-tagging) 😉
Check out this article for more information about our Shopping Feeds requirements.
NOTE: The feed needs to be in either .XLS or .CSV format.
Below is an example of a manual shopping feed:
Please make sure to write the exact same column titles as in this example, otherwise the import will fail.
How to Import a manual shopping feed to Flowbox
If you are interested in adding your manual shopping feed to Flowbox, follow these steps:
Log into Flowbox, then select 'Commerce' in the left-hand menu.
Click on 'Import Catalog'.
Add your Catalog name, link to your manual shopping feed, username and password if needed.
Then add more detailed information, such as locale, market, region, price format, etc.
Once you're finished, click on 'Save and import', and your catalog will begin importing immediately. You will now see products being added to your Products menu.
You can always contact your dedicated Customer Success Manager for support! 👍
Automatically updated
Once successfully imported, your manual shopping feed has a live connection with Flowbox, which means you can easily make changes in your original spreadsheet and your product information will be automatically updated 4-6 times per day by Flowbox.
You can always log in to Flowbox and manually update your imported file whenever you want by clicking on the Product Catalog that you want to update, and select the meatball (three-dot) on the top right, then choose ‘Update’ from the dropdown menu.
Tagging could become a time-consuming task when you have thousands of products. That is not the case with Automatic Tagging within the Flowbox platform.
You can easily include a <product_type> field in your file; where every tag is separated by a ‘>’. In the above example: with product type ‘Womenclothing > tshirt’, the product is automatically tagged with ‘womenclothing’ and ‘tshirt’.