Concept
Feed scheduling
Also called 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.
Frequently asked questions
How often should a product feed be regenerated?
Often enough that the feed is rarely wrong. If prices change weekly and stock is deep, daily is comfortable. If stock is shallow and moves quickly, or prices change through the day, daily guarantees windows where the feed contradicts the site and disapprovals follow.
What is the difference between regenerating a feed and the channel fetching it?
Two independent clocks. You control when the file is rebuilt from the catalogue; the channel controls when it reads the URL. Accuracy depends on both, and a feed regenerated just after the channel fetched it is stale for almost a full cycle.
How often do the major channels fetch a scheduled feed?
Google Merchant Center offers daily, weekly or monthly. Meta supports hourly, daily or weekly. Pinterest fetches once every 24 hours. Microsoft runs on a daily cadence. Meta is the only one of the four offering sub-daily scheduled fetches.
Why does feed cadence cause disapprovals?
Because channels crawl the landing page and compare it against the feed. Any gap between a change in the shop and the next regeneration is a window where the two disagree, and a crawl landing in that window produces a price or availability mismatch.
Related attributes
- price The price attribute is the item's full price before any discount, submitted as a number followed by an ISO 4217 currency code. It must match what a shopper sees on the landing page in that market, including whether tax is included, which is why multi-market Shopify stores so often trip the price mismatch disapproval.
- availability The availability attribute tells a channel whether an item can be bought right now, using a fixed vocabulary rather than a stock count. On Shopify it cannot be read from inventory quantity alone, because a variant that does not track inventory or that allows overselling is purchasable at zero quantity.
Related errors
- Mismatched value: price The price mismatch error means the price in the feed does not agree with the price the channel found when it crawled the landing page. On Shopify the three usual culprits are a feed that has not regenerated since a price change, a link pointing at the wrong market's storefront, and a tax convention difference between the feed and the displayed price.
- Mismatched value: availability The availability mismatch error means the feed says an item is purchasable but the crawled landing page suggests otherwise, or the reverse. On Shopify it is usually a stale feed after a sell-out, or an availability value derived from inventory quantity alone without accounting for variants that do not track inventory or that allow overselling.
Related concepts
Channels this applies to
Primary sources
Channel specifications change. These are the official documents this page is based on.