Product Feeds
This information refers to SuiteCommerce or the Aconcagua release of SuiteCommerce Advanced and later.
A product feed contains a list of items and their attributes that can be used by third-party solutions for marketing purposes. You can use product feeds to advertise your products in marketplaces, shopping channels, and product comparison search engines. With product feeds, you can share your product inventory in a structured format and present your brand consistently in multiple sales channels. You can incorporate promotions data in your Google product feed to display promotions in Google Shopping ads.
Commerce web store extensions are only available if they are provisioned and set up in your account. For more information, see Commerce Extensions.
The SuiteCommerce Product Feeds extension lets you create product feeds for the following services:
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Google Shopping
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Google Shopping with Merchant Promotions
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Facebook Dynamic Ads
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Custom CSV output
SuiteCommerce Product Feeds requires SuiteCommerce or the Aconcagua release of SuiteCommerce Advanced and later. It also requires installation of the SuiteCommerce Configuration bundle.
Product Feed Overview
SuiteCommerce Product Feeds is an extension SuiteApp that includes the Product Feed record, the Promotion Feed record, a Status page, and basic saved search templates for creating your product feeds.
SuiteCommerce Product Feeds lets you create product and promotion feeds containing the following item types:
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Inventory items (and matrix items)
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Non-inventory items (and matrix items)
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Download items
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Kit/Package items
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Assembly items (not including the component items)
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Gift certificates
The workflow for generating a product feed is identical for all data feed types, though the attributes for each data feed type may vary according to the destination and the nature of the product. You use the Product Feed record to determine the settings required to retrieve information about your product inventory, compile the data, and export it in the desired feed format.
The product feed output is generated using data from two sources: item cache and saved searches. When you install SuiteCommerce Product Feeds for the first time or when you update the SuiteApp, an item caching process is triggered to obtain information about all the items that are displayed in the web store. The information obtained relates to the item’s in-stock status, whether it is a matrix item, its URL component, and the URLs of the images associated with the item. This process may take up to several hours depending on the number of items to be cached. You can also manually trigger an item cache rebuild in Lists > Feeds > Status. The caching process is specific to SuiteCommerce Product Feeds only.
To ensure the item cache stays up to date, SuiteCommerce Product Feeds checks every 15 minutes for any changes in item availability, or in item and image links. For example, if your web store is set up to hide items when out of stock and the inventory stock for an item is 0, information for that item will not be retrieved during the item caching. When the item comes back into stock, it is included during the next caching process. An optimized full rebuild of the item cache is performed every 2 hours.
When you create a product feed, you associate a saved search in the Product Feed record. The saved search retrieves information for all supported items (or those items that match the search criteria, if specified in the Criteria tab) and displays all the fields indicated in the Results tab. The default saved search templates provided with SuiteCommerce Product Feeds have been set up to include all the required and optional feed attributes as custom labels.
When you generate the product feed, the product feed generator runs the selected saved search and compares the items returned with the item details previously cached. Only items with information that has been cached and that match the saved search criteria are included in the feed output. The product feed generator then takes the result of this combination in the feed output and exports the fields specified in the saved search with the custom label field.
The product feed output can be accessed at a public URL indicated in the Product Feed record. You can either download the output or allow the third-party service to fetch the product feed at this public URL. You can schedule the product feed generator to automatically refresh your product feed at a specific time interval to ensure your product feed is always up-to-date with the latest changes in inventory.
The attributes for each product feed type vary from merchant to merchant. You may need to configure the default saved search templates to include additional data depending on the service and the items you want to include. Items must be inventory items. For example, requirements may vary if the item is apparel or electronics, or there may be specific requirements for the target country. You enter values for these product feed-specific fields on the Item record:
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Editing each individual Item record manually
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Using Mass Update to update all item records based on specific criteria
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Using the CSV import tool
Product Feed-Specific Fields
When you install the SuiteCommerce Product Feeds extension SuiteApp, product feed-specific fields are added to the Feeds tab on the Item record. According to your product feed implementation, the fields on the Item record may vary from the fields here, but they may include the following:
Shared Fields subtab:
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Field |
Description |
|---|---|
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Age Group (Feeds) |
Demographic for which your product is intended. |
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Category (Feeds) |
Product category to which you want to assign your item. By default, Google Product categories have been provided. |
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Color (Feeds) |
Used to describe the item's physical characteristics. Use this field to indicate color variations in matrix items. |
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Condition (Feeds) |
Condition of the product. |
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Custom Label (Feeds) |
You can use these attribute fields to add additional labels to your product feed. |
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Gender (Feeds) |
Gender for which your product is intended. |
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Material (Feeds) |
Used to describe the item's main fabric or material. |
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Pattern (Feeds) |
Used to describe the item's graphic print or pattern. |
Google subtab:
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Field |
Description |
|---|---|
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Adult (Feeds) |
Indicates a product includes nudity or sexually suggestive content. |
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AdWords Redirect (Feeds) |
A URL used to specify additional parameters for your product page. |
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Energy Efficiency Class (Feeds) |
Energy label. |
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Is Bundle? (Feeds) |
Indicates a product is a merchant-defined custom group of different products featuring one main product. |
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ID Exists? (Feeds) |
Indicates whether the product has a unique product ID. |
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Max. Energy Efficiency Class (Feeds) |
Energy label. Used in conjunction with Energy Efficiency Class. |
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Max. Handling Time (Feeds) |
The longest amount of time between when an order is placed for a product and when the product ships. |
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Min. Energy Efficiency Class (Feeds) |
Energy label. Used in conjunction with Energy Efficiency Class. |
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Min. Handling Time (Feeds) |
The shortest amount of time between when an order is placed for a product and when the product ships. |
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Multipack (Feeds) |
Identifies the number of identical products sold within a merchant-defined multipack. |
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Shipping Height (Feeds) |
Height of the product used to calculate the shipping cost by dimensional weight. |
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Shipping Label (Feeds) |
Label that you assign to a product to help assign correct shipping costs in Google Merchant Center account settings. |
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Shipping Length (Feeds) |
Length of the product used to calculate the shipping cost by dimensional weight. |
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Shipping Width (Feeds) |
Width of the product used to calculate the shipping cost by dimensional weight. |
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Size System (Feeds) |
Country of the size system used by product. |
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Size Type (Feeds) |
Your apparel product's cut. |
For more information on the product feed specifications for Google Merchant Center, see Google Shopping Product Data Specification.
Before You Begin
Be aware of the following important information:
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Set up all required settings in your merchant account before generating the product feed in NetSuite. The data requirements may vary from merchant to merchant.
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Google Shopping: You must have previously signed up for a Google Merchant account and performed basic setup operations (for example, transport and tax options). For more information on setting up a Google Merchant Center account, see Google Merchant Center Help.
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Facebook: You must have a Facebook ad account and a Facebook page. You must first create a catalog in Facebook and associate it with your Facebook ad account. For more information, see Facebook Catalog Setup for Dynamic Ads.
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Mark your product as display in website and active. SuiteCommerce Product Feeds performs an item caching process to fetch all web store items. If you do not mark them as active and display in website, they are not considered.
For more information on how to ensure items are retrieved, see Item Record Setup.
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Ensure that item image names are as per the guidelines in Naming Guidelines. If item image names do not follow these guidelines, their URLs may not be correct, which can cause merchants to reject the product feed.
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Determine the number of items to be included in the feed output. The product feed generator supports up to 60,000 items within a single feed, including matrix items. If you want to export a larger number of items, use complex formulas, or calculate values in real time, split your items into smaller feeds.
Note:A product feed is a scheduled script and subject to the same performance limitations. For more information, see SuiteScript Governance and Limits, Optimizing SuiteScript Performance, and the SuiteAnswers article SuiteScript Error SSS_TIME_LIMIT_EXCEEDED for more details.
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If you want to include promotions as part of your Google product feed, enable the SuitePromotions feature and set up SuitePromotions Item Promotions.
For more information on creating item promotions in SuitePromotions, see Creating Item Promotions
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An item included in the product feed can only have a maximum of 10 promotions associated.
For more information on setting up a Google Merchant Promotions, see Create a Promotion Feed.
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Google Merchant Center only allows you to include up to 500 promotions in one promotion feed.
If the number of promotions associated to the feed exceeds this number, the feed is rejected.
For more information, see Google Merchant Promotions Participation Criteria and Policies.
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Promotion feeds undergo an approval process in Merchant Promotions. This process may take up to 24 hours. See Google’s Promotion Approval Process.
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