Daisycon feed for Shopify

Daisycon is unusually explicit about transport. You send the URL of your product feed to your Daisycon contact person, and Daisycon does not process static files or manually uploaded product feeds. A hosted URL is not one option among several here. It is the only one, and it is exactly what Feedflock serves.

Daisycon asks that the feed URL remains continuously available and that the product data is updated regularly. How often it fetches is not stated, and neither is any item or file-size cap. Feedflock regenerates the feed as often as every hour on a stable URL, so whenever the fetch happens it reads current prices and stock. One thing nobody can automate: because the handover is to a person, the only confirmation that the feed was accepted is your contact's.

Daisycon publishes 22 product feed standards, from Fashion and Electronics to Books and Daily offers, and asks you to pick the one that fits most of your products. General is the standard for when no industry-specific one applies, and it is the one every Shopify catalog can fill, so it is the one Feedflock's template implements. Its mandatory set is stated twice and identically: title, description, unique ID (SKU), price, deeplink to the product and image.

Four things are bound to the feed rather than written into it: the programme, the standard, the language and the locale. That is why the file has no language column and no currency column. It also has a consequence worth knowing: if two of your feeds share the same combination of all four, Daisycon combines their products in one dataset and publishers cannot select either source feed separately. One feed per programme, language and locale keeps things clean.

Daisycon's field-type legend is the whole grammar of the feed. A DECIMAL is a numerical value with decimals separated by a point and no other characters, so prices go out as 49.00 with no symbol and no currency code. A BOOLEAN accepts only true, false or empty, which is why in_stock is the literal lowercase word. An INT is a bare whole number: delivery_time is the delivery time in days, and in_stock_amount the number of units on hand.

Short text fields are VARCHAR, limited to 255 bytes. Note the unit: bytes, not characters, so a title rich in accented letters reaches the limit sooner than its character count suggests. Daisycon also follows the EAN-13 standard for the ean field and says its system validates lengths of 8, 12, 13 and 14 digits, so the barcodes Shopify stores, UPC and GTIN-14 included, fit as they are.

Daisycon's price is the lowest price at which the product is available, the current selling price, and during a discount the original, higher price goes in price_old. Daisycon's own reasoning is that the mapping then survives the periods without a sale. Categories come in three optional forms: category for the main category, category_path for the full path separated by pipes, and google_category_id for the numeric Google ID. The template fills category from your Shopify product type and category_path from your Shopify standard category. google_category_id ships empty until you map it.

One name Daisycon does not settle is the image column: the General standard prints it as "default image", with a space, while many of its other standards call the same field image. The template uses image, in line with Daisycon's own advice to name fields in lower case with underscores, and because your contact maps the columns by hand, a different preference is a one-line e-mail. Additional images are not emitted: Daisycon names no column for them, and its CSV export to publishers contains only the default image anyway.