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Product feed
The feed is the foundation of all recommendations. It is imported regularly, the products are vectorized and shown in the overlay.
Formats
- Google Shopping XML: the feed you most likely already maintain for Google Merchant Center, price comparison sites or your affiliate network. Fields such as
g:id,g:titleandg:linkare detected automatically. - CSV: with a header row, separated by semicolon, comma or tab (detected automatically), encoded in UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1. Compressed files (.gz) work too.
Which fields are needed
| Field | Required | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| Product ID | yes | a unique ID per product that stays the same across imports |
| Title | yes | display and vectorization |
| Affiliate link | recommended | the link visitors click in the overlay, including your partner ID |
| Deep link to the shop | recommended | the regular product URL. ChurnReturn uses it to recognize which product a visitor is currently viewing |
| Image | recommended | display in the overlay |
| Price, sale price, currency | recommended | display, sales are highlighted |
| Description, brand, category | recommended | vectorization; the more content, the more accurate |
| Availability | optional | products that are out of stock can be excluded |
| Variant group | optional | variants of the product being viewed are not shown as recommendations |
| Other attributes | optional | color, material, GTIN and others are stored as attributes and can be used for vectorization |
Affiliate link and deep link
ChurnReturn works with two links per product. The affiliate link is the link with your partner ID, for example from the network feed (the aw_deep_link column at Awin). This is what visitors click in the overlay. The deep link is the regular address of the product page in the shop (merchant_deep_link at Awin, g:link in Google feeds). It is used to recognize the page currently being viewed, so that matching products appear rather than the product itself.
If the affiliate link is missing, the overlay links directly to the shop. The dashboard shows for each feed how many products have an affiliate link.
Field mapping
Common column names are detected automatically, such as sku, name, price, image, url or the Awin columns. If your columns are named differently, we map them for you. Send us the feed URL at info@advaso.com; it usually takes just a few minutes.
Import and schedule
Run the first import with “Import now” on the feed page. For ongoing updates, enter an interval in minutes under Settings, for example 360 for every six hours. Each import shows how many products were added, changed or deactivated. Products missing from the feed are deactivated, not deleted: if the product ID shows up again, the product is back.
Common problems
- Feed could not be read: The URL is not publicly accessible or requires a login. The feed must be retrievable without signing in.
- 0 products imported: Product ID or title cannot be found. This is usually a matter of field mapping.
- Products without images: Image URLs must be absolute, i.e. start with https://.
- Prices missing: Prices may be written as “249.00 EUR”, “249,00 €” or “249.00” with a separate currency. We map other formats for you.
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