CJ Affiliate feed for Shopify

CJ's Shopping (Google Format) feed follows the Google Merchant Center specification. In CJ's own words, a Google feed can be reused "with just a few modifications". The modifications are concrete: condition is required, id is shorter and stricter than Google's, and the six AdWords columns Google uses for its own settings are accepted and thrown away, so the template simply never sends them.

Two syntactic details are easy to miss. Compound columns carry their sub-attributes in the header itself: the shipping column is literally named shipping(price), because CJ asks you to declare the sub-attributes you use even when it is only the price. And while the column order is free, the column names must match the spec exactly; the template's header is pinned against CJ's published field list, and a column CJ does not know costs a warning, not a rejection.

CJ identifies an incoming file by the name you typed on the registration form, not by the URL alone. The name is case-sensitive, includes the extension, and must stay constant, with no date stamps. Get it wrong and nothing tells you: no import confirmation, no results notification. It is the single most common setup failure on CJ's own troubleshooting page, which is why the registration step of this page spells it out.

Reporting is by e-mail, not HTTP: every import produces a receipt confirmation and a results e-mail with a JSON attachment listing line-level errors. CJ fetches a hosted URL once per day; the schedule cannot be changed, and more frequent updates mean pushing to CJ's SFTP instead. The fetch is conditional on the file's Last-Modified date, so Feedflock regenerates the file as your catalogue changes and tracks every download, alerting you if they stop.

CJ lets you pass a bare amount and apply the currency set on the registration form, or pass the amount with its ISO code. The template sends the code, because the form's currency cannot be edited after the feed is created. One product must stay in one currency across price, shipping and tax. The decimal format is a feed-level setting, and CJ's own warning is blunt: pick the EU comma format and submit 1,000, and publishers see a price of 1.

The identifier rule is the one thing that rejects products wholesale: your product must have GTIN and brand, or MPN and brand. If it is missing brand and either of the two, identifier_exists must be no, and a blank identifier_exists defaults to yes. GTIN accepts 8, 10, 11, 12, 13 or 14 digits, including the 10- and 11-digit lengths Google does not take. Whether prices include VAT is the one thing the spec never says; the template sends the Shopify price your customer actually pays.

CJ publishes no category tree of its own: google_product_category takes an exact string from Google's taxonomy, either the numeric ID or the full path, and CJ passes both to publishers. It is optional, but without it there is no product reporting in Insights. Sixteen taxonomy languages are supported (en-US, de-DE, cs-CZ among them), while enumerated values and column names are always English.

The registration form does the rest, and several of its answers cannot be edited later: the feed name, the target country, the currency and the content language are fixed at creation. For item-level commissioning, product lists must exist before the first import, and they read from product_type, google_product_category or the custom labels. That is why the template carries your product type and leaves custom_label_0 and custom_label_1 ready for tags and collections.