What is a product feed?
A product feed is a list of all products and their associated properties. A product feed may contain the product’s name, description, price, SKU, and URL. While this isn't a complete list of every property that may be included in the feed, these are some of the most common properties available across different e-commerce platforms.
What is a product feed used for?
In general, product feeds can be used for different purposes outside of affiliate marketing such as providing product data to online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and Google.
In Refersion, affiliates who join your program can use the product feed to access real-time data about your products via GraphQL to help ensure the information they share when promoting your products is as accurate and up-to-date as possible.
Why should I enable product feed?
Enabling Product Feed saves you the headache of making sure your publishers and affiliates get updated product information and opens up more opportunities to work with certain affiliate partners. Larger publishers and affiliate partners often require programmatic access to product feed data in order to work with merchants.
How will affiliates get access to use the Product Feed?
Affiliates in your program who also have an active account in Refersion's Marketplace may access the product feed using the GraphQL API.
Are there less technical ways affiliates can access the product feed?
Specifically for our product feed feature, using the GraphQL API is the only option available for affiliates who want access to product feed data.
However, we have a separate 'Promote Products' feature (with a different setup process) that allows Shopify merchants to promote their store's products on the Refersion Marketplace's Find Products tab. You can read more about how to set that up here.
How do I enable Product Feed?
Merchants on Shopify can enable Product Feed by navigating to Channels>Marketplace>Product Feed. On this page, you can use the toggle button to enable product feed per store.
Please note the following:
You'll need to have an active offer listed in the Refersion Marketplace in order to enable product feed. If you're unfamiliar with the Refersion Marketplace, you can learn more here.
If you signed up for Refersion prior to 6/28/22, you may be prompted to update your Refersion app in order to enable Product Feed.
Why do I need to update my app on Shopify to enable product feed?
If you installed Refersion prior to 6/28/22, then we our app only asked for the permissions we needed to track referrals from your affiliates as well as power certain Shopify-specific features like automatic discount code creation and order tagging.
In order to pull product data from your store and provide it to your affiliates in the product feed, the Refersion app needs permission to access product data.
Once your update your app, we'll be able to start pulling product data into Refersion for Product Feed and we'll keep the feed updated if you add new products, edit existing products or delete them.
As a note, only affiliates you've partnered with will be able to see information about your products when enabling product feed.