Product Feed

A product feed contain details about your products. It describes how products are identified and organized into families and categories. TestFreaks uses your product feed to help you collect and display reviews in a relevant way.

Concepts

Reviews are typically collected from order data on the Product level, and shared across all products in the same Family.

Feed format

Many companies already have a Google Merchant Product feed available. Standard ecommerce software is typically able to create a product feed in this format with minimal work.

Using a Google Merchant Product Feed is usually the best option to send your product feed to TestFreaks.

If that is not an option we also support a number of other formats. This includes Custom Product Feed formats in XML, CSV or JSON.

Supported fields

Pre-existing product feeds may use different field names. The names above are guidelines for new feeds or when adding fields to existing feeds.

Example of product feed formats

Google Merchant Product Feed

If you are using Google Merchant Center to promote your products, you most likely have a product feed available. Most companies starting to use TestFreaks already have this type of feed available for other purposes.

The feed must follow the Google Merchant Product Feed specification, which is fully supported by TestFreaks and the preferred format to use for a product feed.

Custom Product Feed formats

In case it is not possible to use a Google Merchant Product Feed, TestFreaks support custom formats in XML, CSV or JSON.

XML feed example

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<products>
  <product>
    <sku>P001-02-BLK</sku>
    <family_id>P001</family_id>
    <name>ACME Product1 20mm Black</name>
    <category>Electronics &gt; Widgets</category>
    <url>https://retailer.example/p-001</url>
    <image_url>https://retailer.example/images/300x300/p00102B.jpg</image_url>
    <manufacturer_sku>ACMEP1</manufacturer_sku>
    <ean>36725234635</ean>
  </product>
</products>

JSON feed example

{
  "products": [
    {
      "sku": "P001-02-BLK",
      "family_id": "P001",
      "name": "ACME Product1 20mm Black",
      "category": "Electronics > Widgets",
      "url": "https://retailer.example/p-001",
      "image_url": "https://retailer.example/images/300x300/p001021B.jpg",
      "manufacturer_sku": "ACMEP1",
      "ean": "36725234635"
    }
  ]
}

Feed delivery

We schedule daily fetches of your feeds and support feed URLs on http://, https://, ftp:// and sftp://.

Alternatively, you can schedule feed uploads to TestFreaks using FTP or SFTP after setting up an account with us.

For supported platforms, TestFreaks has direct integrations to access the product information. Please ask your TestFreaks contact for details.

Products API and Review Summaries API

You can use our Products API to access your product data, or the Review Summaries API to see what review information is available for each product and product family.

Checklist and best practices

Is the feed automatically updated?

Is the feed filtered? Product which are temporarily out of stock should ideally still be in the feed. Additional filtering can be done in the TestFreaks system if required.

If you want syndicated data, are you sending all product identifiers that will allow that product matching?

Can product families and variations be deduced from the feed?

Should some products be excluded or dealt with in a different way? If so, is the data needed to make those decisions included in the feed? This might apply to gift cards, services, products which you need to wait longer before being able to review, or items where you want to specifically ask about size fit, etc.

Does it contain what we need to create review invitation mails? Product images? Human readable names?

Does it contain the same identifiers that you intend to use in order feeds and in your display integrations?