Feed format

Text (TSV)

Tab-delimited text feed

A TSV feed is the same structure as a CSV with tabs separating the fields instead of commas. Because a tab almost never appears inside product data, it needs far less quoting than a CSV, which makes it the more robust of the two delimited formats and the only one Microsoft Advertising accepts.

Specification

File extension: .tsv .txt
Content type: text/tab-separated-values; charset=utf-8
Compression: Gzip is accepted by most channels and required by OpenAI, which takes .tsv.gz.
One product is: One product per line, with a header row naming the attributes. Fields are separated by a single tab character, and consecutive tabs represent an empty value.
Escaping: Strip tabs and line breaks from every value rather than trying to quote them, because tab-delimited parsers vary in whether they honour quoting at all. Encode as UTF-8 without a byte order mark.

A valid tab-delimited text feed

Two products, every required attribute, nothing omitted for brevity. Copy it and replace the values.

id	title	description	link	image_link	availability	price	brand	gtin	condition	item_group_id
SHIRT-BLK-M	Northbound Oxford Shirt, Black, Medium	A long-sleeved Oxford shirt in 100% brushed cotton.	https://example.com/products/oxford-shirt?variant=101	https://cdn.example.com/oxford-black.jpg	in_stock	49.00 GBP	Northbound	05012345678900	new	SHIRT-OXFORD
SHIRT-BLK-L	Northbound Oxford Shirt, Black, Large	A long-sleeved Oxford shirt in 100% brushed cotton.	https://example.com/products/oxford-shirt?variant=102	https://cdn.example.com/oxford-black.jpg	out_of_stock	49.00 GBP	Northbound	05012345678917	new	SHIRT-OXFORD

Which channels accept it

Channel support for Text (TSV)
Channel	Support	Notes
Google Shopping	Supported	Accepted as a text feed alongside comma-delimited files.
Meta	Supported	Accepted for a catalogue data feed.
Microsoft Advertising	Preferred	The delimited format Microsoft accepts. A comma-delimited file is not a substitute.
Pinterest	Supported	Accepted for a scheduled data source.
OpenAI	Supported	Accepted gzipped as .tsv.gz, though Parquet is preferred.

What breaks a tab-delimited text feed

Quoting is not reliably supported

A CSV parser is expected to honour double quotes. Tab-delimited parsers vary, and some treat a quote as an ordinary character. That makes stripping tabs from values the only dependable approach, rather than quoting the fields that contain them.

Tabs arrive from pasted descriptions

A tab in product data is rare but not impossible: merchants paste from Word, from a supplier spreadsheet, or from a PDF, and a tab comes along. One tab in one description shifts every subsequent column on that row, which reads as a completely different error.

Renaming a CSV does not make it a TSV

Changing the extension or the content type leaves commas separating the fields. Microsoft will reject the file or read the whole row as a single column, and the error message will not mention delimiters.

Editors quietly convert tabs to spaces

Many editors expand a tab to spaces on save. Inspecting a TSV in one of those and saving it, even without meaning to change anything, destroys the delimiters throughout the file.

Frequently asked questions

Is TSV better than CSV for a product feed?

More robust, yes. A tab almost never appears inside product data, so far less escaping is needed, and a stray comma in a description cannot split a row. Support is slightly narrower, but every channel documented here except OpenAI takes it uncompressed.

Can I just rename my CSV to .tsv?

No. The delimiter is in the file, not the extension. The file has to be regenerated with tabs between fields.

How do I handle a tab inside a description?

Strip it at generation time, replacing it with a space. Quoting is unreliable in tab-delimited files because parsers differ on whether they honour it.

Does Microsoft Advertising accept CSV?

Its delimited format is tab-separated. A comma-delimited file has to be regenerated rather than renamed or re-declared with a different content type.

Errors this format causes

Duplicate product id A duplicate id error means two or more rows in a feed claim the same identifier, so the channel cannot tell which one describes the item and keeps only the last it processed. On Shopify it usually means the feed was built per product rather than per variant, or that a SKU used as the id is blank or reused across variants.

Related concepts

Product 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.

Primary sources

Channel specifications change. These are the official documents this page is based on.

Last reviewed 18 September 2026 View as markdown