There are about 2.64 billion people who shop from online eCommerce stores. That means 33% of the world’s population are digital shoppers.

And it is projected that the percentage will reach up to 95% by 2040.

Great news for eCommerce store businesses, right?

However, there are 12-24 million eCommerce stores, and the number is increasing rapidly. This means the competition is fierce.

If you have launched a WooCommerce store, the first concern you will have is how you can bring people to your site. Sure, you can run paid ads on different platforms.

They do bring traffic to your site, but you cannot possibly rely only on ads forever. Also, they are costly and can’t promise you sales. You need to have a sustainable marketing strategy in order to succeed with your e-store.

One mighty effective marketing method most new eCommerce store owners are unaware of is product feed marketing. With product feed marketing, you can reach thousands, if not millions, of potential buyers online with minimum effort. And in some cases, you can do it for absolutely free.

In this article, we will discuss what a WooCommerce product feed is and how to generate a WooCommerce product data feed with a plugin.

Let’s get started.

What is a WooCommerce product feed?

WooCommerce product feeds are structured data files that detail the goods sold in an online shop built on the WooCommerce platform. It is used for exporting product data in a standardized format, making it easier to share and integrate with other platforms or services.

Details like the product’s name, description, price, image, category, availability, and other relevant attributes are usually present in the product feed. It is used as a data source for a variety of purposes, including product listings on marketplaces, comparison shopping engines, affiliate marketing networks, and other online advertising channels.

In simple words, a product feed is a spreadsheet file that contains your WooCommerce product details. If you are familiar with Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel files, you will know how it looks.

By generating and distributing a product feed, WooCommerce store owners can reach a wider audience, increase product visibility, and drive more traffic and sales to their online store. It allows integration with third-party platforms that require a product data feed for seamless synchronization and updates.

To create a product feed in WooCommerce, you can use a product feed plugin for WooCommerce specifically designed for this purpose. These WooCommerce product feed manager plugins extract the necessary product information from your WooCommerce store and generate a feed file in a format like CSV, XML, or JSON. The generated feed file can then be submitted to various channels or platforms that support product feed imports.

What are the attributes in a WooCommerce product feed?

Attributes in a WooCommerce product feed refer to the specific characteristics or properties of a product that are included in the feed. These attributes provide additional information about the product and help describe its features, variations, and specifications.

Attributes, in the most basic sense, are the names of the columns (Column headers) in a table or spreadsheet. You need to input the product details under them. They play a crucial role in accurately representing the products in the feed and facilitating effective integration with other platforms or services.

Common product feed for WooCommerce attributes

Different channels have different guidelines and attribute requirements. However, here are some common attributes you may find in a WooCommerce product feed:

• Title: The name or title of the product.
• Description: A detailed description of the product, highlighting its features, benefits, and specifications.
• Price: The cost or price of the product.
• SKU: A unique identifier for the product, known as a Stock Keeping Unit.
• Image URL: The URL(s) pointing to the product image(s).
• Product URL: The URL of the product page on your WooCommerce store.
• Category: The category or categories to which the product belongs.
• Brand: The brand or manufacturer of the product.
• Availability: The availability status of the product, such as “in stock” or “out of stock.”
• Variations: If the product has variations, attributes like size, color, or material can be included to differentiate them.
• Weight: The weight of the product, which can be important for shipping calculations.
• Condition: The condition of the product, such as “new,” “used,” or “refurbished.”
• GTIN (Global Trade Item Number): A unique identifier like UPC, EAN, or ISBN for the product.
• MPN (Manufacturer Part Number): The specific part number assigned by the manufacturer.
• Additional Attributes: Any other relevant attributes specific to your products, such as dimensions, materials, or technical specifications.

These attributes provide a comprehensive and structured representation of your products in the product feed. They enable other platforms or services to accurately understand and display the information.

How to create a WooCommerce product feed

It’s pretty simple to create a product feed file. You don’t need technical skills if you are trying to create a CSV file in Microsoft Excel. However, you will need some coding knowledge if you are trying to create a WooCommerce XML product feed or a JSON feed.

For CSV, you just need to learn the necessary attributes a channel asks for and arrange them in the column header. After that, copy-paste your product data underneath the attributes.

For example, here’s the attribute list for Bol.com.

• EAN
• Condition of product
• Product description
• Product image
• Product count in stock
• Price
• Delivery method
• Delivery time

Now you set these attributes in a spreadsheet as column headers and copy-paste all your Woo products data under them. Simple, right?

But, this process is entirely manual and prone to a lot of errors. Let’s find out the problems you may face attempting to create a WooCommerce product feed manually.

Challenges faced creating a WooCommerce product feed manually

Manually creating a WooCommerce product feed may seem easy at times, but it has some major drawbacks.

Copy-pasting large amounts of data is prone to errors

Let’s say you have a busy store with a good number of products. Let’s say you have over a hundred products and regularly add new ones.

Now you want to list and promote them in multiple channels, such as Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping, Target, Walmart, etc. And there, your problems creating product feed manually will start.

You first need to learn all the guidelines and attributes of these channels. Then create separate WooCommerce product feed files for them and set the attributes properly.

Then copy-paste your product data under them. For that many products, copy-pasting product information accurately will be a nightmare. Also, different channels have different sets of attributes.

So, you will have to set the attributes and paste product data carefully. Otherwise, the channel will reject the feed.

Furthermore, the process is inherently time-consuming, which directly undermines the primary objective of a product feed: facilitating swift connectivity with multiple channels.

Updating WooCommerce product feed manually is impractical

When you have a busy store with many products, you may want to implement different pricing strategies. For example, you will want to offer special discounts, seasonal discounts, discounts on coupons, occasional discounts, run sale campaigns, etc.

You would also remove some products on season change or remove out-of-stock products. Also, some products may need some different updates as well.

And you need to update these changes in all the product feed files you created for different channels.

Every time you make any changes to any product, you need to update that product data in the feed files. And then upload them to their respective channels.

When you run a discount offer, you need to update the discounted price in all your feed files to make sure all your channels display the same data. And when the discount period finishes, you need to update the feed again so that they don’t display lower rates.

You also need to remove out-of-stock products from your WooCommerce product feed files. All these will take a tremendous amount of time and labor.

Even it’s possible that you will require to update all the feed files every day or even after an hour of updating.

Overall, frequently updating feed files manually is not really practical.

Some product feed rejection statistics

• If you filter out-of-stock items from your feed, you can increase your ROI by 181%. This will require constant attention and revisions if done manually.
• 7% of product feeds submitted to Google Shopping are rejected due to severe data errors. There is a greater possibility of this happening if the product feed is created manually.
• Shipping is the biggest headache when it comes to setting up product feeds. Almost 24% percent of all product rejections can be traced back to this feature.

There is a lot to keep track of when you create a product feed manually. This will take time and energy away from more productive endeavors that would contribute to the development of your company.

Using a plugin for creating WooCommerce product feed

A product feed manager for WooCommerce plugin can solve all the problems we mentioned above. You can say the benefit of using a WooCommerce product feed generator plugin is that it can remove all the drawbacks we mentioned.

A product feed pro WooCommerce plugin can generate product feed files for different channels with minimum effort. Most of these plugins have pre-made templates for the channels. That frees you from the burden of studying/learning the attributes and guidelines.

You can even create woocommerce product XML feeds without any coding skills.

Moreover, these plugins have automatic update features. So, you no longer need to worry about updating your feed files every time you make any changes. Isn’t that great?

There are a number of product feed plugins available to generate WooCommerce product feed. We will discuss one that we believe is the best product feed for WooCommerce plugin. It’s called CTX Feed.

We chose this particular solution because it offers a highly popular free version that comes with exceptional features. Additionally, it provides a premium version that offers even more robust and powerful functionalities.

You can create WooCommerce product feed files for 130+ channels with this plugin. It has built-in templates for all the channels.

You only select the template and click generate, and the plugin will do the rest. It will collect all your WooCommerce product information according to the attributes automatically and generate the feed file.

The best feature of this plugin is the URL/HTTP/SFTP/FTP connection. Giant marketplaces such as Amazon, Google Shopping, Facebook, etc. support uploading feeds through URLs. You can host your feed file in your WooCommerce server and share the URL.

The channels will fetch your product data from the feed and display it on their platform.

How to generate a WooCommerce product feed using a plugin

We will begin by installing the free version of CTX Feed. Log in to your Woo admin panel and jump to Plugins. Click the Add New button and search and find the plugin.

Install and activate when found.

Click on Make Feed from the plugin menu.

This is an empty feed window.

Let’s say you want to create a WooCommerce product feed for Google Shopping. Through this channel, you can reach millions of potential customers at no cost.

From the Template dropdown, select Google Shopping.

Select a file type.

The plugin generates the necessary attributes for the channel at the bottom when you select the template.

Your job is done. After you click the generate button, the plugin will collect all your product data automatically and create the feed file for Google Shopping.

The pro version has advanced filter options from where you can exclude stock-out products. Also, filter your feed by product ID, category, status, etc.

Different channels ask for some attributes that are not available in WooCommerce. The channels will not accept the feed without those attributes. This plugin also has a solution for this problem.

It has integrated all the necessary extra attributes as custom fields in its settings.

You can toggle to enable and then input value from product pages.

After that, the plugin will automatically insert the value in the feed.

How to copy/download WooCommerce product feed file

From the plugin menu, click on Manage Feeds. All the feeds you’ve made can be found on this page.

The Update Interval is where you set the time, after which all your feed files will be updated automatically. You will find settings for editing, regenerating, downloading, duplicating, and copying feed URLs.

Let us explain the URL connection method again. We have created a WooCommerce product feed for Google Shopping, and we want to connect through the feed URL.

Google Shopping has an option called Scheduled Fetch. This option allows you to upload your product data through a feed URL.

After you select the Scheduled Fetch option, Google will take you here –

You can copy the feed URL from the feed settings and paste it into the URL box. Google will fetch all your product data from the URL.

Additionally, Google also lets you set fetch frequency. This means any changes you make in your WooCommerce store, CTX Feed will collect the changes and update the feed files. And at your set time, Google will fetch those changes from the feed URL.

Overall, you will no longer need to worry about anything after you generate and connect the feed file.

Benefits of product feed marketing for WooCommerce store

Product feed marketing offers numerous benefits for a WooCommerce store, including:

Increased visibility

By leveraging product feed marketing, you can enhance the visibility of your WooCommerce store’s products across various online channels.

Expanded reach

Product feeds allow you to showcase your products on multiple platforms, reaching a broader audience and potentially attracting new customers.

Targeted advertising

With product feeds, you can create targeted advertising campaigns, ensuring that your products are shown to users who are specifically interested in what you offer.

Improved conversions

By displaying accurate product information, such as pricing, availability, and compelling descriptions, product feeds can boost conversion rates, leading to more sales.

Real-time updates

Product feeds can be dynamically updated to reflect changes in pricing, stock availability, or other product details, ensuring that customers always see the most up-to-date information.

Cost-effectiveness

Compared to traditional advertising methods, product feed marketing often offers a cost-effective approach, as you only pay for clicks or conversions rather than impressions.

Detailed product information

Product feeds allow you to provide comprehensive details about your products, including attributes like size, color, material, and more, giving potential customers a clear understanding of what you offer.

Competitive advantage

By utilizing product feeds effectively, you can gain a competitive edge in the market as your products become more visible and accessible to potential customers than those of your competitors.

Enhanced customer experience

With accurate and detailed product information readily available through product feeds, customers can make informed purchase decisions, leading to a positive shopping experience.

Performance tracking

Product feed marketing often provides analytics and tracking capabilities, allowing you to measure the performance of your campaigns, identify successful strategies, and make data-driven optimizations.

Wrap up

Majority of online shoppers start their search on search engines, price comparison engines, marketplaces, and shopping engines before jumping into your store. Therefore, if you list your products in these channels, you can directly reach potential customers who are looking to buy your products.

As a result, it will increase your conversions, improve your reputation, and overall grow your business.

We hope this article on WooCommerce product feed will guide you in creating and connecting your feed files. Let us know if you have any questions.