2020 has been a bit unusual as a whole, but it has been amazing for ecommerce.

We already knew that with each passing year, more people start to rely on ecommerce for their shopping needs—but the current state of the world has only expedited that level of adoption.

There’s no better time to be selling your products online. To better assist, empower, and serve the needs of our users, we’ve been working to improve our processes and database technology.

Here’s some of the latest updates and newest features from GoDataFeed.

Enhanced Data Validation and Optimizations

We’re always working to add integrations to new channels and to improve our existing feed templates, but this time around we’ve also made huge strides with our validation engine for Google Shopping.

When a feed compiles, our system assesses fields for different data scenarios. Before this update, messages ranged from missing either required or optional data to whether a value was supported by the channel.

Here are some of the features we added to our feed validation:

  1. Grouped by type, i.e. invalid format vs. missing recommended data
  2. Additional information and reference links to channel documentation
  3. Recommended actions with shortcuts to mapping or rules
  4. Shows affected column and values 
  5. Download the report details as .csv file
  6. Dismiss optional messages

Although currently limited to Google Shopping, we’re working to expand enhanced feed validation to our other feed templates.

Read more on enhanced validation

Protect your channel feeds from bad data imports

Big drops in your number of important items might indicate an issue, like a misconfiguration on the source data or invalid syntax somewhere in some file, ultimately impacting the entire data import. If the number of imported items has decreased, that may be cause for some concern.

Product protection acts as a safety net in such instances.

If enabled, our new product protection feature (Products > Product protection) will stop the import process if the decrease in number of imported items decreases beyond your chosen threshold.

An example of the enabled product protection feature in which the configuration will stop the import if the number of products is lower than the chosen threshold.

Read more on Product Protection

Updates to our integrations

It has been our mission to improve our product import integrations to get more data, faster. Here are some of the latest updates and new integrations added to our app.

Product import sources

  • NEW: Semicolon-delimited product files now supported via HTTP import
  • Shopify GraphQL source type is in beta to get more data, in less time
  • WooCommerce APIv3 now used for our primary Woo product import
  • Magento 2 imports product inventory data from Magento’s multiple inventory sources feature

Channel feed templates

  • NEW: Snapchat Advertising template
  • NEW: Facebook Local Inventory template
  • Facebook feed updated with 250+ attributes to support enhanced catalogs for Facebook/Instagram Shops and Checkout
  • Microsoft Advertising feed template, formerly known as Bing Shopping
  • Verizon Media feed template, formerly known as Yahoo Product Ads
  • Google Shopping Merchant Center feed to include fields for Local Pickup and Pricing rules for Buy on Google

Introducing GoDataFeed Managed Services

Feed management involves tight, scaling demands that are best handled by a dedicated team member (or more), if not a trusted third party. Whether you have that in-house bandwidth or need to outsource that work, we’re here to support you.

Our full-service feed management program includes:

  • Data standardization
  • Adding additional and/or missing attributes
  • Key attribute optimization
  • Problem resolution & issue monitoring
  • Daily monitoring & passive optimization

Read more on our feed management program