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Knowledge base

Product feed concepts

These are the ideas feed documentation assumes you already hold: what a product feed is, why channels want one row per variant, what a product identifier is for, and why the interval between feed regenerations decides how often a channel is wrong about you.

Feed scheduling scheduled fetch, feed refresh, and feed cadence
Feed scheduling is the arrangement where a sales channel fetches a feed from a fixed URL on a repeating timetable instead of the merchant uploading a file. It matters because the interval between regenerations is the window in which a channel can be wrong about a price or a stock level, and most mismatch disapprovals are caused by that window being too wide rather than by a bad mapping.
Product feed data feed, shopping feed, product data feed, merchant feed, and catalogue feed
A product feed is a structured file listing every item a shop sells, with one row per purchasable item and one column per attribute the destination understands. Sales channels use it to build their own copy of a catalogue, which is why a feed is a translation of a shop's data into another system's schema rather than an export of it.
Product identifiers unique product identifiers, UPI, and GTIN, MPN and brand
Product identifiers are the values that let a sales channel recognise that your listing and someone else's describe the same physical product: a GTIN, or a manufacturer part number together with a brand. They matter because a channel that can identify a product can attach reviews, specifications and competing offers to it, and one that cannot has to treat your listing as an unknown object.
Variant-level feed variant-level export, one row per variant, and SKU-level feed
A variant-level feed emits one row for each purchasable variant rather than one row per product, because sales channels treat every size, colour and material as a separately buyable item with its own price, stock and barcode. A Shopify product with four sizes in three colours is one product in the admin and twelve items to a channel.