Dognet feed for Shopify

Most channels hand you a specification. Dognet hands you a sentence: in the XML feed step of its advertiser integration guide it says, in Slovak, Czech and English alike, that it most often uses feeds in the same structure as Heureka or Google Shopping. There is no Dognet field list, no required set and no value vocabulary anywhere on its site.

Feedflock's Dognet template is therefore the Heureka structure, trimmed to what an affiliate network can use. The elements that only mean something to Heureka itself are gone: the HEUREKA_CPC bid, the voucher and extended-warranty elements, the accessory links and the carrier blocks. Five fields are required by the template (ITEM_ID, PRODUCTNAME, URL, IMGURL and PRICE_VAT) because without them an offer cannot be identified, linked, shown or priced. Dognet itself marks nothing as required.

We asked Dognet how the file gets to them, and the answer is the simplest one: the merchant sends Dognet a URL of the feed, and Dognet provides it to publishers. That is exactly what Feedflock produces. There is no upload step and no API, and Dognet states no fetch cadence of its own, because the publishers importing your products do the fetching on their own schedules.

Two practical consequences follow. The URL is handed to third parties, so it has to stay public and stay put: a feed behind a login is no use to anyone. And because any partner may read it at any time, freshness matters at every hour of the day. Feedflock regenerates the feed as often as every hour, so whoever fetches it reads current prices and stock.

Dognet's integration guide mentions a preferred separate feed with its UTM tags in the URL and the pre-discount product price, which contradicts the Heureka structure it accepts. So we asked. Dognet's answer on price: the feed should state the final price of the product for the shop's customer, the price with VAT, and the net price or the VAT rate may be added only as optional extras. PRICE_VAT therefore carries the price you actually charge.

The answer on tracking was just as clear: no UTM in the feed, because the affiliate link adds it during the redirect. The URL element stays the plain storefront address pinned to the variant, with nothing to maintain when campaigns change. The VAT element is in the template but ships empty, because inventing a rate would be a tax claim made on your behalf. Map 20 or 21 once and it is done.

Dognet's own publisher tutorial works through real advertiser feeds, and it shows what partners do with yours. They choose between ITEM_ID and ITEMGROUP_ID as the import key, depending on whether they want every size as its own product or one product per group, so both are filled by default. The tutorial also calls out product names made of nothing but a model code as unusable for a customer, which is why PRODUCTNAME defaults to the title with its variant, and the size and colour travel separately as PARAM blocks.

Availability is said the Heureka way, through DELIVERY_DATE: 0 means the variant is on hand (or you do not track its stock), and a backordered or sold-out variant goes out with 30 days. Unlike on Heureka, sold-out variants are not removed: a partner who already imported the product is better served by a row that says unavailable than by one that disappears. And CATEGORYTEXT deserves real care, because the tutorial's filters run on it. A catalog categorised as just "All products" cannot be sliced by a partner at all.