Webgains feed for Shopify

Webgains' Knowledge Hub says it outright: the platform checks that your feed is valid and adheres to the Google Shopping Feed specifications, and it accepts Google Product Feeds in either CSV or XML. Column headers and tag names must match the field names in Google's specification; anything that does not is interpreted as a custom field, custom fields are capped at ten, and in XML they need the g: prefix. There is no Webgains-own field to learn; the sweep that looked for a deeplink or network-ID column found none, because link stays the plain product URL and Webgains converts it to a tracking link after processing.

Where Webgains is genuinely stricter than Google is the mandatory set. Nine fields are required in every country: id, title, description, link, image_link, availability, price, and then google_product_category, which Google treats as optional, and shipping, which Google calls conditional. For Germany and France the table adds sale_price, unit_pricing_measure and unit_pricing_base_measure. Feedflock's template maps the whole nine from the start, so the overlay is covered before you paste the URL.

Transport is a URL pull on a merchant-chosen schedule. In the Webgains platform you click Create Feed, paste the feed's public URL and pick how often Webgains should re-fetch it: daily, weekly or monthly, with the time and day configurable. A manual Refetch button exists for the impatient, though it queues rather than runs instantly. One account holds up to 25 active feeds, all fetched and processed from public URLs.

Every fetch lands in the Feed Manager history: a green "Successfully processed" with the run time and product count, or a downloadable per-product error log. When a fetch fails outright the history shows the HTTP status, and a 403 from an otherwise healthy URL is the signature of Cloudflare blocking Webgains' fetcher, which the documentation answers with three IPs to whitelist. Feedflock regenerates the file as often as every hour, so whatever cadence you pick, every fetch reads current prices and stock.

Webgains' failure modes are per-row and non-destructive, and they are worth knowing before the first import. The quiet one is the duplicate id: the product is overwritten with the latest occurrence in the feed: a silent loss, not an error. Feedflock's default id is the Shopify variant ID, which never repeats and never changes, so the collision cannot start.

The rest is forgiving by design. A feed that has never been successfully processed makes no feed available to publishers at all. One that errors after a success keeps serving the last good version while you fix it. And under 10% erroneous rows the feed is still processed, with the errors shown for fixing. The downloadable log names the exact products. The Feed Manager history is the ground truth for all of it, which is also where Feedflock's missed-fetch alerting points.

The category is Google's taxonomy: a numeric ID or the full path with spaces around the ">" respected. Webgains supports the taxonomy in eleven locales (the same list as the network's footprint) and records ID values as their en-US text, which is why a numeric ID is the robust choice: it skips manual category mapping on Webgains' side entirely. Feedflock maps your product types to the same tree, so the mandatory field is filled with a value Webgains accepts verbatim.

Two honest caveats, both stated rather than hidden. Webgains documents the shipping value in its own extended form (price, minimum and maximum transit time, like "9.95 EUR:2:5"), while the template emits Google's <g:shipping> sub-attribute form from your delivery options; whether the platform's check accepts that form is the one seam to watch in the first Feed Manager error log. And a January 2027 change raises the minimum image size to 500 × 500 px for Google-format feeds; Feedflock's image guidance already reflects it.