2Performant feed for Shopify

2Performant's own words: the CSV is added through a link to the file. You share a URL and they fetch it three to four times a day, with the schedule adjustable on request. The one-off file upload (their legacy guide caps it at 10 MB) is the fallback, not the norm. And the freshness contract is stated from the merchant's side: the feed must be found at a URL and updated automatically whenever a change was made. That is exactly Feedflock's hosted-URL model.

The cadence cuts both ways: price and stock changes reach affiliates within hours, but a broken URL means stale data until the next fetch succeeds. Feedflock hosts the file on a stable URL, regenerates it as often as every hour and tracks the fetches, alerting you if they stop. And if you already run a Google Merchant feed, 2Performant accepts that URL verbatim; this template exists for the merchant who wants 2Performant's own field set instead.

The spec's file rules, quoted: one product per line; the content delimiter is a double quote, a single quote or a backtick; the field separator a comma, semicolon, tab or pipe; UTF-8. Your feed can carry as much information as you need, mapped to their required and optional fields in their UI. That is why the template's header row uses their field labels, identical to their own sample CSV: the mapping step is just confirming each column.

The legacy blueprint adds the strictness worth knowing: embedded quotes must be doubled, Enter is the row separator, and blank spaces before rows or other small errors can make the whole upload fail. Feedflock's exporter quotes and doubles exactly as prescribed, so a quote inside a description never breaks a row, and a broken row never silently breaks the file. XML is the alternative: RSS and Atom are both supported, with all tags recommended present even when empty.

Eight fields are mandatory, with validations quoted straight from the spec page. Title is capped at 255 characters; Description takes text and simple HTML from a whitelist (b, li, ul, ol, dl, dd, i, u, br); Category is a tree with no mandated taxonomy, just your shop's own path. The template's defaults are the honest ones: the title pairs product and variant so per-variant rows never collide, and the description is stripped to plain text.

Three details deserve care. Sale price is a bare number (dot decimal, no thousands separator), and no currency column exists anywhere in their field set: the number is read in the program's currency, so the feed never states one. Product ID must be a number, which is why the default is Shopify's numeric variant ID (a gid:// URI would violate the rule; a SKU works only when it is numeric). And Availability has a six-value vocabulary (0, 1, In Stock, Backorder, Out Of Stock, Preorder), with sold-out rows staying in the feed as 0 rather than disappearing.

Beyond the mandatory eight, Old price carries the pre-discount reference under the same number rules. The template maps it from your compare-at price and leaves it empty when the product is not on sale, because an always-filled old price invents a permanent discount. Brand and GTIN round out identification. One spec oddity, recorded honestly: GTIN's stated validation (greater than 8, less than 14 characters) would reject a legitimate 14-digit GTIN, so the rule is quoted in the template but deliberately not enforced.

For everything else there is Other data (JSON or YAML) and up to four custom fields of at most 254 characters each. What the field set does not contain is just as notable: no carrier, no shipping cost, no COD element. Delivery is not part of the 2Performant feed at all, and neither is a currency column. The feed describes the products; the program describes the commercial terms.