Partner-ads feed for Shopify

Partner-ads does not specify a feed the way a comparison site does. Its product-feed page shows one XML example with sixteen elements, from kategorinavn to gender, and then adds a line that changes everything: you decide the tag names yourself. Partner-ads maps whatever arrives at your URL, which is why there is no required set, no vocabulary and no rejection rule to read.

Feedflock's template emits exactly the example's vocabulary, Danish names and all, on the reasoning that a feed matching what Partner-ads printed needs no mapping conversation. Five fields are required by the template (produktid, produktnavn, vareurl, billedurl and pris) because without them a product cannot be linked to or shown in a banner. Partner-ads itself marks nothing as required. The names are a convention, not a rule: Partner-ads maps them on its side either way.

Partner-ads states exactly two requirements for a product feed: that it is XML built like the example, and that Partner-ads can get access to it via a URL, an http address, at your end. Registration is just as short. There is no form: you send a link to the feed to support@partner-ads.com and say which programme it belongs to.

What is not stated anywhere is how often Partner-ads re-fetches the file, how large it may be or how errors are reported. There is no validator either, so before you send the link, open the feed URL in a browser window with no session: if it needs a login, it will simply never be read. Feedflock hosts the feed on a public URL and regenerates it as often as every hour, so whenever the fetch comes, it reads current prices and stock.

The example's price placeholder is the whole price specification: 9999.99, a dot decimal with two places, no currency symbol and no ISO code. The feed has no currency element at all, because the programme's country (Denmark, Sweden or Norway) decides it. Whether the price includes VAT is not stated either. Feedflock sends the price your customer pays in the shop, which is how Danish consumer prices are quoted.

The example gives lagerstatus no vocabulary, only a placeholder. The one place Partner-ads has ever written the values down is its own WooCommerce plugin, which sends the English words in stock and out of stock, so those are the template's two values. The same plugin lets a merchant choose whether sold-out products stay in the feed. Feedflock keeps them in and marks them, so a partner's page says unavailable instead of losing the product.

Shipping in a Partner-ads feed is two free-text elements: fragtomk for the shipping cost and leveringstid for the delivery time, with no carriers, no number format and no unit. The template leaves both unmapped, because a hard-coded 0 would promise free delivery for every product. Partner-ads' own plugin makes both a setting the merchant types once per country, so one flat rate and one "1-2 hverdage" for the whole catalog is exactly the intended shape.

Because nothing in the file names the country or the currency, a shop selling to Denmark, Sweden and Norway creates three feeds from the same template and sends each URL to the matching programme. That is also how Partner-ads' own plugin works, with a separate feed link per country. In Feedflock each of them is its own feed with its own URL.