What is a Product Feed?
The Product Feed is important because it unlocks many important features of the Earned Content Platform, such as: media syndication, shoppability, content organization, automatic updates, and more. Via the feed, Social Native is able to import the product catalog data on your ecommerce website in an automated fashion. This includes the product metadata such as, product name, product URL, product image URL, product availability, category information, and more.
When we process your Product Feed, each product from the Product Feed becomes a stream. You can think of streams as folders. When we collect content on behalf of your brand, the content must be organized and tagged to different streams as it goes through curation. Once the Earned Content Platform processes your Product Feed, you are able to tag the content to the streams that mirror the products from your Product Feed. The point being you’re matching the product that is visually in the user-generated image.
With the product streams created in your Earned Content Platform account, and the content tagged to corresponding product streams, Social Native widgets implemented across your site are able to display the images, along with the products tagged to the content. The users can click on the tagged products and navigate to the corresponding product page, which helps drive conversion.
While you can create the product streams manually in the Earned Content dashboard, without a Product Feed, it’s much harder to create a shoppable experience out of your user-generated content (UGC) in an automated fashion, especially if your product catalog consists of hundreds to thousands of products. The Product Feed allows us to import your catalog at scale as well as maintain the most up-to-date state of your products.
In short, here are main functions of a Product Feed:
Stream Creation
Automatic product stream (folder) creation in the Earned Content Platform for each unique product on your product feed.
Each stream will automatically include the name, product URL, image URL, and product ID (and any extra information) from your product feed.
Shoppable
In order to make user-generated-content shoppable, it needs to be “tagged” to a product stream within the platform. Therefore, the product feed fuels the shoppable experience.
The “Shop This Look” area of the media lightbox features tagged product streams and the product link.
Platform Sync
Social Native processes your Product Feed daily, which means our platform will stay in-sync with your product catalog data as changes are introduced on the e-commerce platform.
Updates to the product names, product URLs or images can be made easily & automatically by the feed.
Products can be added or removed or flagged as out of stock easily via the feed.
Multi-Account Setup
To take advantage of a multi-account structure, product feeds are a prerequisite.
Images tagged to product streams in the master account can be synced with the related child accounts as long as the matching product streams exist on both master and child accounts.
Why is the Product Feed in an Social Native Schema the best option?
Although Social Native can support a custom schema feed, sending the Product Feed in an Social Native schema enables your brand to take full advantage of feature set available in the Earned Content Platform.
At a high level, here are main advantages of using a Social Native Product Feed:
Faster processing (validation/import)
Ability to remove products or delete them completely
Supports Multiple Universal ID (UPC, EAN) per product
Supports multiple category relationships per product
Ability to enable Category Widgets
Full support of the automated product feed validation (syntax issues, broken URLs, etc.)
In-depth explanations and examples of the advantages mentioned above
Quicker implementation turn around time: Typically the product feed integration is the most crucial step during onboarding. Social Native can significantly speed up the implementation time required to automate a product feed if your brand provides a Social Native Product Feed. This allows your brand to go live sooner!
Delete Functionality: You can delete product streams with a Social Native Product Feed, keeping the product data within your brand’s Earned Content account to stay clean and more in-sync.
Multiple UPC association: You can associate multiple UPC’s to a product using a Social Native Schema. (Whereas in a custom feed, a Brand is limited to a single UPC association per parent product.) This is one of the requirements for brand-to-retailer syndication feature.
Multiple Category association
You can associate multiple categories to a product using the Social Native Schema. (Whereas in a custom feed, a Brand is limited at a single category association per product, typically either the highest level or most granular level.)
This is an important feature as it allows for better use of Dynamic Category widgets, as well as enabling category filters on gallery widgets.
As an example, if you go to Brand’s website and look under the Product’s section, a user can usually see the product hierarchy. If you see a product is within Category A, that same product could also be associated to Category B or C. However, the Brand would be forced to pick only one of the categories to associate the product with if using a custom feed. This would limit how many category pages you could place a Social Native UGC widget on.
Feed Validation upon every import / Closer monitoring for possible issues: With a Social Native Product Feed, Social Native will validate your Social Native Product Feed against the Social Native Schema validator upon every import. This means that if there is ever a syntax issue with any given XML nodes, our Support Team is alerted and are able to follow up with your technical contacts. With a custom feed implementation, the responsibility is on your Brand to validate the feed against your own schema and ensure that that there are no issues. If there is a syntax error in the feed, that product is skipped and not imported.
Less Coordination when an update is needed
If something in the feed needs to be changed / updated (ex: add category information to the feed), there is typically less coordination or implementation updates that need to be made on Social Native's side to support the change in the case of an Social Native Product Feed.
You should still notify your Social Native contact if you are making changes to your Product Feed so we can advise and monitor.
Whereas typically an update to a custom feed requires implementation and code review effort on Social Native's side.
Because everything is manually mapped for a custom feed, an update will also typically require a manual remapping.
Product Feed Business Requirements
Beyond determining what type of schema to send the feed in and the minimum required product fields, here are a few UX impacts to consider before creating a sample file:
Single vs. Parent/Child Product Hierarchy
The parent/child hierarchy refers to parent (style-level) products and the product color variants as children.
Option A - Not using the Parent/Child Hierarchy: Tag collected images to parent products (Master level)
What would the XML in the Product Feed look like for this behavior?
XML explained: Each product node represents an individual product at the Master level (terminology may differ depending on e-commerce systems and businesses). No color specific products are included in the feed.
Option B - using Parent/Child Hierarchy: Tag collected images to child products (Color Variant level)
Outcome: The product with the matching color is shown as the associated product in the lightbox. Tagging the child product also automatically tags to the parent product. This gives you the option to display all color variants in a PDP widget while at the same time having the color specific variant display in the lightbox.
Pro’s: This type of hierarchy support is most beneficial for clients where colorway is especially important, like make-up companies.
Note: Size variants are visually indistinguishable in UGC, which is why we only support a hierarchy for color variants. Size variants should never be included, as this would also complicate the moderation process.
Example:
***NOTE:*** Size variants are visually indistinguishable in UGC, which is why we only support a hierarchy for color variants. Size variants should never be included.
Example XML syntax for Social Native Product Feed:
XML explained: The first product node contains the style level product. The second and third product nodes represent that same T-Shirt but in the color variants available. You’ll notice they each have their own Unique Product ID, but the color variant nodes have extra elements: <Color> and <ParentID>. <ParentID> references the style level product ID. This is how the hierarchy is created on the backend. The <Color> node is optional but included in the above example for clarity.
Categories
Categories are groups of products within the Earned Content Platform. If a product is associated with a category, then any content tagged to that product is automatically associated with that category.
This relationship can be leveraged in multiple ways, the most important being:
Display content by category via widgets or API
Add category filters to a gallery widget
XML for this feature:
XML explained: You’ll notice the Category node structure, as well as the fact that each Product node references the Category Unique ID. This creates a relationship between the product and category when we ingest the feed. If you require multiple category relationships per product (when a product is associated with more than one category), you’ll notice the syntax is slightly different than if we were to just relate one category.
In this example, we see a category widget using the category ID to dynamically return the UGC that’s tagged to product streams that are related to certain categories defined in the Product Feed.
Out of Stock and Unavailable Products
What is the desired outcome for associated images when products go out of stock, or are no longer sold?
If your “out of stock” product pages become inactive 404 pages, we want to avoid driving users to those pages. Additionally, you might not want users being directed to product pages if they can’t purchase, even if the page still is live.
Product catalogs often change and we want to accurately reflect the state of your products. We can include an element in the Product Feed that tells Social Native whether the product is available or not. If it is not, we hide the specific product from any widget.
Here is an example:
In this example, the product stream that is tagged to this image was marked as unavailable via the product feed. With this updated product data, we know to hide the product stream in the Social Native widget.
A main factor on deciding which behavior to implement is whether you’d like users to have the ability to click-through to Product Pages that are out of stock or not.
XML for this feature:
XML explained: In this example, we see a new element in each product node: <Availability>. Depending on whether the value within this element is true or false, we know whether to hide the product from the widget or not. Because we run a Product Feed import daily, this can be updated to reflect the current state of your product catalog.
Product Feed Documentation
You can visit our Product Feed documentation for the Social Native Schema. At minimum, we require 4 elements per product node:
Name
ProductUniqueID
ProductUrl
ImageUrl
Beyond these elements, each product may contain more depending on the behavior/feature you’re looking to implement. Here is our product element definition table.
Integration Steps
To ensure a smooth and efficient process, here are the main steps to follow:
Review Social Native Product Feed Documentation
Create a Sample File
Validation
Send sample file to Social Native
Ready for Import
Social Native hosted SFTP account for you to deliver the Product Feed
URL provided by client that is hosting the Product Feed
This can take up to 5 business days to successfully set up as it involves code review.
Common Errors
Here you’ll find some notable errors we’ve seen in Product Feeds during the validation process. Please avoid these common errors as it will fail validation and will be unable to import:
Validation by the client
Spaces in ProductUniqueIDs
You’ll see here the ProductUniqueID has a value of “APT S” - this will fail our validations.
Element Syntax spelling errors / case-sensitive
Notice above how some elements are not formatted as we specify in our documentation:
Make sure your syntax matches our specifications
Empty elements
Although this example has all 4 required elements, the <Availability> element is empty and this will fail our validation schema. If you’re not going to include certain elements for certain products, remove the element for that product.
Not including one of the four required elements
Make sure you have all 4 required elements for each product node:
If one is missing, the validation will fail!
Proper encoding of URLs and special characters
Make sure any special characters have proper encoding
Characters such as & should be &
If you have special characters in URLs, make sure those are encoded properly as well
Including size variants
Size of a product is indistinguishable in UGC, therefore we shouldn’t have any size variants in the Product Feed. Try and keep it at the configurable product level, and if you are going to include variants remember that Social Native only supports color variants.
Proper category relationships
Notice two categories are related to this product, but the syntax here is wrong.
This will fail validation
If adding more than one Category relationship, you need to nest inside <CategoriesID> element
Valid syntax would look like:
<CategoriesID>
</CategoriesID>