Getting started

Introduction

What Product Feed Master is and the core concepts: feeds, products, channels, and mappings.

Product Feed Master is a product feed management platform: it centralizes your product catalog into one master feed, lets you map and transform fields per destination, and keeps every channel you sell or advertise on in sync on a schedule — without writing code.

Four concepts show up throughout this documentation. Understanding how they relate makes everything else easier to follow.

Feed

A feed is your master product catalog — a single set of products stored in the canonical field schema (see canonical product fields). You build a feed by attaching one or more input channels to it, and you distribute it by attaching one or more output channels.

Channel

A channel is a connection to an external system — a file, an API, a database, a marketplace. Every channel has a type (CSV, XML, Shopify, SFTP, and so on) and a direction when attached to a feed: in to import products into the feed, or out to export the feed to it. See connecting a channel.

Mapping

A mapping connects a field on one side of a channel attachment to a field on the other, with an optional chain of transformation rules in between (trim, replace, format a number, and so on). Mappings are what turn a messy source column into a clean canonical field, or a canonical field into the exact attribute name a destination expects. See how field mapping works.

Product

A product is one row in a feed. Its values normally come from whatever input channel last synced it, but you can edit a product by hand at any time — the next import will simply overwrite it again, same as any other change. See editing products.

Putting it together

A typical setup looks like: an input channel (say, a Shopify store) imports products into a feed and maps its columns to canonical fields; you review and tweak a handful of products by hand; an output channel (say, Google Merchant Center) maps canonical fields to the attributes that channel expects, with transformation rules cleaning up titles and prices along the way; a sync schedule keeps the output channel current automatically.

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