Spartoo feed for Shopify

Spartoo's integration overview states the model plainly: you give them a URL that links to a file with all your product information, and every hour their processor downloads the file and integrates what it contains. No upload, no SFTP, and where a merchant has no server, Spartoo's own advice is Dropbox. A hosted, always-fresh URL is exactly what Feedflock provides, so the cadence is theirs and the freshness is yours.

Changes land on the next hourly pass. The documentation's own contrast with the webservice route is that the feed is not real time. Because Feedflock rebuilds the file hourly, every poll reads current prices and stock, which is what Spartoo's freshness rule asks for: the file must be up to date so unavailable items do not appear as in stock.

This is the thing to understand about Spartoo: a style that comes in two colours is two products with two different identification codes, while a product can have multiple sizes nested inside it. Feedflock's template renders exactly that: one <product> per colour, with every size a <size> child holding its own stock count, order reference and EAN, the same shape as Spartoo's own sample feed.

Stock is per size and zero is a switch: when a size's stock is 0 the product is deactivated and no longer appears on Spartoo, so a sold-out item stays in the feed at 0 rather than disappearing. size_reference follows Spartoo's own recommendation: the product reference and the size name joined with an underscore, which is what their order and return exports use.

Spartoo classifies by code. product_sex takes exactly six values (H, F, M, K, G, B), and the error message names them. product_style wants the numeric category code from Spartoo's published table of 398 categories (a name is tolerated only if you then pair it in the back-office matching tool), and color_id is one of 19 colour ids. Send a code that does not exist and the product is rejected; send an unknown colour and it imports, but drops out of the colour filters.

The same discipline covers shoe materials: the four composition fields (upper, lining, insole, outer sole) take codes from a 52-row table, each valid only in its own field, and Spartoo states there is no matching tool for materials. Feedflock maps these from metafields or constants, so the codes are chosen once per product group rather than retyped per size.

Photos live in a <photos> wrapper as eight named elements, url1 to url8. The first is required, below 350 × 350 a photo is not displayed, and from 800 × 800 up a zoom appears on the site. Two traps worth knowing: each photo is fetched once and stored on Spartoo's servers, so changing an image without changing its URL does nothing, and the filename may not contain spaces or accented letters.

The EAN question looks contradictory in the documentation until you read the French original: the English page says not required, while the French and German field tables mark it mandatory for the logistics service. In practice, a seller who ships their own orders can leave it empty and one on Spartoo's fulfilment service cannot. And the feed stops at the catalogue: delivery, order handling and real-time stock sync run through separate seller webservices, not this file.