Perplexity product feed for Shopify

There is no Perplexity feed specification. PayPal, which operates Perplexity's in-chat checkout, comes closest to a documented statement: “Google Shopping CSV or similar structured formats work well.” So the document is RSS 2.0 with Google's g: namespace, one item per variant, with Google's attribute names and Google's money shape: amount, space, ISO 4217 code.

Feedflock's Perplexity template does not copy that field model; it shares it with the Google Merchant Center template by reference, so the two can never drift. If you already run a Google feed, this one will feel identical, and the same rendered file can serve both channels.

Where Google checks your offer against your own product page, Perplexity matches it to a product it already knows, and the key it uses is the GTIN. Every integration guide warns that rows without one are routinely left out of shopping answers, so GTIN coverage, more than any other field, decides whether your products surface at all.

Feedflock takes the GTIN from the Shopify barcode and asks you to be strict about it: fill every code the manufacturer assigned, and leave the rest empty rather than sending an internal SKU. A wrong GTIN is worse than a missing one. For products that genuinely have no identifier, identifier_exists is derived per variant, yes when there is a barcode or a vendor, no only with neither.

The contract and the tooling tell the delivery story from two sides. The Merchant Program Terms name push channels: an API, an SFTP link, a dedicated S3 bucket. Current feed-tool documentation lists a hosted feed URL that Perplexity fetches as the zero-configuration route, and onboarding walkthroughs mention a feed-URL step. Feedflock covers both: paste the stable URL if you are offered the field, or let your own pipeline push the rendered file to whichever channel you are provisioned. It regenerates every hour either way.

How often Perplexity reads the data is not published; the “every few hours” figures in circulation are invented. What the terms do say is qualitative: product data must be accurate and complete at all times, no thinner than your other channels, with price parity named explicitly. An hourly-regenerated feed is the practical way to keep that promise; fetch tracking shows the downloads, and the first PerplexityBot in the log is the earliest signal the pipeline is live.

The program is for merchants who sell and ship to the United States; Instant Buy, the in-chat checkout, targets US residents, and PayPal's Store Sync covers the US and UK with Germany announced. For a Czech shop that already serves American customers this is a real, free channel; for a shop selling only at home it is one to revisit as coverage widens.

Two shortcuts are worth knowing. If you are on Shopify, Shopify Catalog can syndicate your products to AI platforms, Perplexity among them, but auto-sync exposes whatever data quality the store already has and gives you no merchant dashboard. And PerplexityBot can cite crawlable pages with schema.org Product and Offer markup without any membership at all. The feed plus the application is the route that adds control and the dashboard.