Product feeds: what they are for and what your file must contain
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A product feed is an export of your catalogue, hosted at a public URL, that Affilae reads regularly and makes available to your affiliates. This page explains what a feed is for, what your file must contain and how your partners use it. For the step-by-step setup, see Adding a product feed.
http:// or https://, in CSV, XML or JSON format. The form only asks for an address, so your file must be readable without any login or password.
What a product feed is for
Without a feed, an affiliate can only promote your brand in general. With a feed, they work on your individual references, and your sales stay attributed.
- Price comparison sites can index your catalogue and send you traffic that is already close to buying.
- Content publishers build buying guides, comparison pages and ad units that display your real prices.
- Your prices, stock levels and promotions stay consistent across every partner, which cuts customer complaints.
- You track your best sellers partner by partner through the Top selling products dashboard, fed by a dedicated feed.
The application sums it up this way: “Products feeds are usually exported from your catalog products in Google Shopping XML format, and indexed in a search engine or even a price comparison for example.”
What your file must contain
Affilae downloads your file, detects its columns and asks you to match them to its own attributes. Six attributes must be matched, otherwise the feed stays incomplete:
- Product ID: the unique identifier of each reference, stable over time.
- Title: the product name as it will be displayed by the affiliate.
- Description: the commercial description, clear and free of HTML tags.
- Landing page: the URL of the product page on your website.
- Image: the URL of the main picture.
- EAN: the barcode. If you do not have one, choose No match.
Seven more attributes are optional, but they are the ones that make your catalogue genuinely usable: Price, Category, Availablity, Language, Additional images, Promotion and Promo code.
On the technical side, three encodings are accepted: UTF-8, UTF-16 and ISO-8859-1. For a CSV file, the Field separator can be a comma, a semicolon, a vertical bar or a tabulation. For an XML file you will name the tag that delimits one product (XML Item); for a JSON file, the equivalent key (JSON Item).
A dynamic export, not a frozen file
Affilae does not keep a copy of your catalogue: it goes back and reads the URL you declared. That address must therefore point to an export regenerated by your shop, not to a file uploaded once and left alone.
- Keep the same URL over time: changing it means reconfiguring the feed.
- Regenerate the export at least once a day so that prices and availability stay reliable.
- Do not put any authentication, IP restriction or intermediate login page in front of it.
Re-reads are automatic and you have nothing to trigger. They are not instant: after a correction, the status tooltip warns that “the status may take a few hours to update”.
How your affiliates use your feed
Your partners never get your raw URL as it is. Affilae builds a tracked version of it, unique to each partnership, in which every product link is already rewritten so the sale is attributed.
The affiliate finds it in their own account, on the Product feed page of their profile.
In the table, the URL column carries two distinct addresses: Feed URL, your original export, and Tracked feed URL, the version to publish. That second address is the one the affiliate copies into their tool or their aggregator.
Affilae builds the tracked address from your feed, the partnership identifier and the settings you declared. It looks like this:
https://feeds.affilae.com/api/feed/affilae/builder?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fcatalogue.csv&partnershipId=...&encoding=UTF-8&separator=,&format=csv
One practical consequence: as long as the format and the encoding are missing from your feed, no tracked version can be built and your partner sees “N/A” instead of the address.
If you do not have a feed yet
Most e-commerce platforms (Shopify, PrestaShop, WooCommerce, Magento) can generate a catalogue export, often in Google Shopping XML format, which works as it is.
If your export is too thin or impossible to customise, a feed aggregator acts as a middle layer: it connects to your shop, enriches and segments the catalogue, then publishes a clean URL that you declare in Affilae. Several solutions exist on the market, most of them paid. Affilae recommends none in particular: the choice is yours, as long as the URL produced is public and regenerated regularly.
Best practices
- Create one feed per scope rather than a single catch-all file, for example one feed per language or per country, each with an explicit title.
- Check that every Landing page points to a product page that is genuinely online: this is the number one cause of an unusable feed.
- Fill in Price, Category and Availablity even though they are optional: these are the columns affiliates use most.
- Keep a stable Product ID from one export to the next, otherwise your statistics restart from scratch at every update.
- Plan ahead before changing the structure of your export: the column mapping will have to be confirmed again.
Real-life examples
- A fashion retailer and a price comparison site. You export a CSV of 8,000 references, you assign it to that comparison site only, it picks up the tracked URL and your sales are reported automatically.
- A deals website. You fill in Promotion and Promo code in your export: the affiliate can then build discount pages that stay accurate without any manual update from you.
- A brand that wants to know its best sellers. You create a second feed dedicated to the Top Sold Products use case, and the dashboard gives you the sales ranking, partner by partner.
Related articles
- Adding a product feed
- Error codes linked to products feed
- Dashboard, Top Selling Products
- Tracking, product categorization
Frequently asked questions
No. A feed can cover only part of your catalogue, for example one range, one language or a promotional selection. You can create several feeds inside one programme and assign each of them to the relevant partners. Two feeds cannot share the same title, nor point to the same URL.
It is recommended. A « Language » attribute does exist, but one file per language stays easier to maintain and clearer for your partners. You then assign each feed to the affiliates of the matching country, and give each one an explicit title so you can find it in the list.
No. Affilae builds a « Tracked feed URL » for each partnership, distinct from your original export. The product links it contains already carry the affiliate tracking identifier, which is what allows sales to be attributed. As long as the format and the encoding of your feed are missing, that address cannot be built and shows « N/A ».
Yes. A Google Shopping XML export is the most common case: you declare it in XML format, then name the tag that delimits one product in the « XML Item » field. CSV and JSON are accepted too, with UTF-8, UTF-16 and ISO-8859-1 encodings.
At least once a day if your prices and stock levels move. Affilae reads your URL again regularly and automatically, so you have nothing to trigger. Re-reads are not instant: after a correction, the status tooltip states that « the status may take a few hours to update ».
The form only asks for an address, with no credentials, so your file must be reachable without authentication. If your host filters by IP address, ask support for the address Affilae downloads feeds from, then allow it. An intermediate login page returns HTML instead of your catalogue and puts the feed in error.