Product Feeds

Visual UGC offers the ability for Customers to create and update Product Tags within their Stack in an automated manner with our Social Commerce feature.

The feature, which can be enabled by your Customer Success Account Manager, can poll an XML Product Feed on a periodic basis, updating values such as Price, Description, Availability, and even supporting variances in Language or Locale.

To find out more about Configuring your Product Feed and Visual UGC’s requirements, please read the guide below:

Product Feed Settings

Feed Format

Visual UGC Product Feed feature works with XML feeds which are based upon Google’s Product Merchant Feed type and Facebook’s Product Catalogue Feed type.

Providing Product Feed

Visual UGC currently only supports providing a Product Feed from a publicly accessible URL.

Required Elements

The following elements are required to be included in your Product Feed in order for Visual UGC to be able to successfully synchronize the two systems:

<id> - String : Between 1 - 50 Characters. 
<title> - String : Between 1 - 150 Characters 
<description> - String : Between 1 - 1250 Characters 
<link> - URL : Between 1 - 250 Characters 
<image_link> - URL : Between 1 - 250 Characters 
<availability> - Options : 'in stock', 'out of stock', 'preorder' 
<price> - String : Between 3 - 20 Characters

Optional Elements

Visual UGC can accept a range of additional fields in your Product Feed and append this to the Product Tag within your Stack. For the most common additional Fields, Visual UGC expects them to be in the following format:

<condition> - Options : 'new', 'refurbished', 'used' 
<shipping> - SubElements : 'country', 'service', 'price' 
<expiration_date> - dateTime 
<brand> - String : Between 1 - 70 Characters 
<gtin> - String : Between 1 - 50 Characters 
<mpn> - String : Between 1 - 50 Characters 
<product_category> - String : Between 1 - 250 Characters 
<product_type> - String : Between 1 - 250 Characters 
<additional_image_type> - String : Between 1 - 250 Characters 
<gender> - Options : 'Male', 'Female', 'Unisex' 
<age_group> - Options : 'Newborn', 'Infant', 'Toddler', 'Kids', 'Adult' 
<color> - String : Between 1 - 25 Characters 
<size> - String : Between 1 - 25 Characters 
<item_group_id> - String : Between 1 - 50 Characters 
<sale_price> - String : Between 3 - 20 Characters 
<sale_price_start_date> - dateTime 
<sale_price_end_date> - dateTime

Validating a Feed

Visual UGC offers an XSD which Customers can use to Validate their Feed Structure or Build their Feed. This XSD is available here.

Update Frequency

Visual UGC offers the ability to Update / Synchronise your Product Feeds based upon the following schedules:

  • Daily
  • Weekly
  • Manual

Locales / Markets Configuration

Grouping Products across Locales

Visual UGC offers the ability to store variance information for different locales (ie. USA / CAN-FR / CAN-EN) within a single Product Tag, allowing for customers to show different information (ie. Name, Description, Price, URL) via Visual UGC’s Widgets.

For Visual UGC to group / link these variances from different feeds, the same external product id must be used across each of the connected feeds.

To configure widgets to show the correct variance information the field <data-tag-group> - String : Between 1 - 50 Characters should be added to the Embed code of the Widget. The field needs to be populate with the relevant Product Group configured in Settings > Product Feeds.

Find below an example Embed Code used to deploy a widget that should display product information for a feed with Product Group Name = CAN-FR:

<!-- Stackla Widget Embed Code (start) -->
<script>
var stackWidgetAssetPath = '//widgetapp.qa.stackla.com/';
var stackWidgetDomain = 'widgetapp.qa.stackla.com';
var stackWidgetCustomData = {};
</script>
<div class="stackla-widget" data-ct="" data-hash="xxxxxxx" data-id="81494" data-title="Carousel MMS Test" data-ttl="60" data-tag-group="CAN-FR" style="width: 100%; overflow: hidden;"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
(function (d, id) {
var t, el = d.scripts[d.scripts.length - 1].previousElementSibling;
if (el) el.dataset.initTimestamp = (new Date()).getTime();
if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
t = d.createElement('script');
t.src = '//widgetapp.qa.stackla.com/media/js/widget/fluid-embed.js';
t.id = id;
(d.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || d.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(t);
}(document, 'stackla-widget-js'));
</script>
<!-- Stackla Widget Embed Code (end) -->

If the field <data-tag-group> is not included in the Embed code the product will default to its primary variance information.

Locale Limits

Visual UGC does not enforce any limits around the number of different locale variances which can be stored on a single Product Tag.

Setting up your Feed

To setup your Feed, you will need to go to Settings > Product Feed (if not available, please contact your Customer Success Account Manager) and select Add Product Feed.

Here you will be presented with the opportunity to define:

  • Product Group Name: This is where you define the ID you wish to use for your various locales / markets (ie. USA, CAN-FR, CAN-EN)
  • Product Feed URL: URL for specific Feed
  • Update Frequency: How often Visual UGC should poll the feed to look for changes

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