Feed form and grid
Arlanix Product Feed

For arlanix/product-feed 1.0.0

Feed form and grid

What each field of a feed's form does, section by section, and what each column of the feed grid says. Your first feed goes through the form in order, with a screenshot of every step.

General

Field Default What it does
Active On Off, the cron leaves the feed alone; see Switch a feed off.
Identifier The feed's own code, used in the file's name. Lower-case letters, digits, dashes and underscores; whatever you type is turned into that form on save. No two feeds share one.
Name What the grid shows.
Type The platform's field catalog: what the mapping is copied from and checked against.
Store View Decides the prices, the currency, the language and the product links. One feed is one store view.
Owns the products On Off for a Merchant API feed that adds fields to another feed's products instead of defining its own; see Point a feed at it.

Products

Field Default What it does
Conditions None: every product of the store view's website Which products go in, the way a catalog price rule chooses them.
Stock status Nothing chosen: any stock status In stock, Out of stock, or both.
Inventory sources Nothing chosen Shown with Multi Source Inventory only.
Prices for customer group NOT LOGGED IN Which price the feed carries when group prices differ.
Prices with tax As the store view shows them Or Including tax, Excluding tax. The default follows the store view's Display Product Prices In Catalog setting.

A condition can be on any product attribute, the SKU, the product type, the attribute set or a category; the SKU and the category open a list to pick from. An anchor category counts the products of the categories below it, as it does in Magento's own rules. Add group adds conditions of which only one has to hold (If ANY of these conditions are TRUE), or which must not hold (FALSE).

If your store uses Magento's Multi Source Inventory, an Inventory sources field sits under Stock status, listing the sources that serve the feed's store view. Leave it empty to count stock as a single-warehouse shop does. Pick one or more to count only those: a product is in stock if any of them holds it, and the quantity the feed writes is their sum. With Multi Source Inventory switched off the field is not shown.

Prices for customer group and Prices with tax decide which price the feed carries. Leave the defaults, NOT LOGGED IN and As the store view shows them: they give the price a visitor sees on your site, which is what Google compares against.

Mapping

The table of rules that fill each field of the feed, with Copy from and Add field: Mapping explains every column.

Google categories

Field Default What it does
Taxonomy locale Empty: en-US The language of Google's category names, such as en-GB or de-DE.
Default Google category Empty Sent for products whose own categories have no assignment. Empty sends nothing rather than something wrong.

The table of assignments and its Copy from are in Google categories.

Channel

Field Default What it does
Channel Where the feed goes: File, SFTP or Google Merchant Center (API). The fields below it are that channel's; see Choose how a feed reaches Google.
Format XML XML, CSV, TSV, JSON or JSON Lines (NDJSON). For a file and an SFTP feed.
File name Empty: the identifier and the format For a file feed. A name only, without a folder.
URL For a file feed: the address the file is published at. Updated when the feed is saved.
SFTP connection, Remote file name or path For an SFTP feed; see SFTP connections.
Google account, Feed label, Content language, Target countries, Supplements feed For a Merchant API feed; see Point a feed at it.
Allow an empty feed Off Off, a run in which every product is left out publishes nothing and keeps what was published; see An empty feed is never published.

Schedule

A Merchant API feed has no schedule: its products go as they change.

Field What it does
How often Never, Every hour, Every few hours, Every day, Every week or Every month. Never is for a feed you only run by hand.
Interval For Every few hours: every 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 or 12 hours.
On For Every week: the day.
On day For Every month: the day, 1 to 28. The 29th to the 31st are not offered, since a month short of them would be skipped.
At hour, At minute The time of day.

The feed grid

  • Schedule: when the feed runs, as its Schedule section sets it (Every day at 03:00, Every Monday at 04:00, Never), and under it when the cron takes it next. A Merchant API feed says As products change.

  • Health: whether the last delivery put the feed's products in. For a Merchant API feed the count of products left out is what the feed leaves out now, since its products are mapped as they change.

    Health Meaning
    OK Every product the conditions pick is in the feed.
    3 left out · Why? Three products have nothing in a field the mapping marks Required, or a dictionary excludes them. The rest went out.
    Empty, not delivered · Why? Every product was left out, so nothing was published: see An empty feed is never published.
    No products matched The Products section's conditions and stock setting pick no product. Nothing was published.
    Failed · Why? The run broke off; Why? shows its error.
    Running… A run is going on now.
    Stopped responding · Why? The process running the feed stopped, for example killed by the server, and the run was given up. The next run starts afresh.
    — The feed has not run yet.

    Why? opens what the feed's last run said, in a panel over the grid.

  • Last delivery: when the feed was last delivered, or never delivered. A failed delivery says failed and when. A Merchant API feed also says how many products were sent, are waiting, and Google refused. While the catalogue is being built, after an upgrade or a change to what the feeds read, it says Catalogue: being built, and nothing is delivered until it is. An inactive feed says switched off.

  • File: for a file feed, a link to the published file with its size, or not generated yet.