Frequent Asked Questions

General questions

Why should i go with your plugin?

We are very proud of our woocommerce product feed manager and we think it is the most powerful plugin out there build by feed marketeers especially for woocommerce powered shops. Our plugin will help you to get the most out of your product feed.

The power of the plugin is that you can add the data from your shop to any feed attribute required, recommended or supported by Google. Next to that you are able to alter the data from you wordpress woocommerce database so you can optimize the data you send to Google. We support custom product fields and product variations making our plugin even stand out more from the competition.

How does woocommerce product feed manager work?

Basically the plugin will generate a xml product feed valid for the merchant channel you choose. It will take the data from your woocommerce powered online shop and create a valid product feed. The data feed is uploaded and synced to the merchant channels of your choice like google, bing, facebook, amazon, etc so that the product you sell show up on their shops and search engines.

So with the use of our plugin you are able to increase your exposure and sell your products on many more channels.

Seems a bit pricy?

Say we charge €40/hour, we are only charging you for max 3 hours of our effort. In exchange, you get a complete product feed management software, with a solid codebase and with advanced features with 1 year updates of all supported channels. We also constantly add new features and bug fixes, so the cost is well worth it!

Compare our price with comparable hosted solutions that charge our annual price per month! Look around, try several solutions and you will understand our plugin is far superior to other solutions compared to functionality and price.

Were can i download the plugin?

You can download the Premium version of our plugin right after you have purchased the product feed manager plugin. You will receive an email with your product license and a download link.

If you are looking for the free trail version of the Woocommerce Google Feed manager you wil find it in the wordpress repository. Click here if you would like to download it.

Where can i find my license key?

On the top right of our website you will find a link “Your account”

Please click that link and login to your account.

On your account page you can find your license key by going to “Purchase history > (Details) View details and Downloads”

There you will see your license key.

How do i upgrade my free google version to the Premium plugin

You have installed the free google version of our plugin and after a while you would like to upgrade to the premium version.

If you want to keep your previously created product feed you have to upgrade your plugin manually. With the following steps, you are sure you can keep working with your existing product feeds.

Updating your free version to the paid version is straightforward.

Step 1. (important) Create a backup of the existing feeds on the settings page of our plugin.
Step 2. Deinstall the free feed manager plugin from the plugin page (you will not lose your backups).
Step 3. Install the premium product feed manage plugin like any other plugin
Step 4. Enter your license key and validate.
Step 5. (e-commerce only) install the google channel in the channel manager
Step 6. Restore the feed back-up in the settings page from our plugin.
Step 7. Regenerate the feed(s) manually.
Step 8. Ctrl +F5 to empty your browser cache.

And you are up and running.

Can i change the url of the shop?

The license has a restriction on the url it has been assigned to. This is done as soon as you enter your license key to register your plugin. When you want to switch your plugin to a different url you will notice that the activation will not work.

Assigning a different domain to an license key can be done in your account page on our website. On your account page click the “View Licenses” and than “Manage sites”

You can change the domain to a different license by deactivating the url and enter a new url.

On other easy way to remove the domain from a license number is to deinstall the plugin and reeinstall the plugin on an other domain.

What are the supported feed channels?

At the moment we support the next channels:

With the Custom XML and CSV Export template you can create nearly every possible channel you ever would want to have.

Are you missing a channel template?
We add new channels templates on a regular base. We add channel templates based on your requests!

What are the plugins that work together with yours

We do support different plugins that are invaluable for having a professional webshop. Here is the list:

If you have a great plugin we do not support at the moment please contact us so we can have a look at the plugin and make it work with ours.

Does the plugin work on a WordPress Multi site installation

Yes, our plugin does work on a WordPress Multi site. You will need to activate the woocommerce plugin on each shop separately. So make sure you do not “Network activate” the Woocommerce plugin in the Network admin.

Tracking traffic from channels

You can easily track traffic from Google shopping or other channels by adding a Google campaign url to the permalink in your product feed as a suffix.

Check the little how-to clip how you can do that.

Campaign URL builder: https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/

Problem solving

Anny issue? Start here

Start with the next steps when you have any issue with your installation and plugin.

First make sure you have all your plugins, theme and wordpress updated to the latest version. Follow woocommerce requirements as a minimum for the use of our plugin.

PHP 5.6 or greater
MySQL 5.6 or greater
WooCommerce 2.5 requires WordPress 4.1+
WooCommerce 2.6 requires WordPress 4.4+
WP Memory limit of 256 MB or higher for larger shops

If you have all of that sorted please follow the next steps before contacting us.

Deactivate and then activate the plugin. Test the issue.
If that does not resolve the issue, deactivate and reinstall the plugin over the current installation. Than activate it again and test the issue.
If it still does not work, remove the plugin through the plugins page (be aware, this will also delete all existing feeds) and reinstall it. Then test the issue again.
If the problem still exists, contact our support.

Unable to activate License key

If you are having trouble getting license keys to activate, here some tips to help resolve common issues.

Requests blocked by a security plugin

Security plugins for WordPress often have features that interfere with the license key API requests. These features tend to make the activation (and other API requests) return an unexpected response, causing the activation routine to fail.

The iThemes Security plugin is known to have a setting that can cause this issue. The setting is called Filter Suspicious Query Strings in the URL

To resolve the issue, simply disable the Filter Suspicious Query Strings in the URL setting. If you’re not using iThemes Security, it will be named something different, though similar.

Requests blocked by special .htaccess rules

Some sites will add special rules to the .htaccess file in order to block certain IP addresses or add additional protection to the site.

If you have any special .htaccess rules in place and license keys are not activated, try removing the rules and then activating license keys. If the license keys activate properly now, you will need to adjust the rules to allow the licensing API routines to function.

Requests blocked by a coming soon or maintenance plugin

If you are using a coming soon or maintenance mode plugin, it’s likely that license keys will not be able to be activated, since the coming soon / maintenance mode plugin will block the requests. To resolve the issue, simply deactivate the maintenance mode or coming soon plugin. If you need to leave it active, deactivate it temporarily to test the license key activation process and then reactivate the plugin.

I can not see the feed, how can i preview the feed in my browser?

Feed warning, invalid xml feed

There can be many reasons why a feed is invalid. We have build the feed in such a maner that it will only happen very sporadic.

In case it does please do submit your feed in your Google Merchant center and check what is going on in your feed in the Feed debugger from Google. It is very powerful and spot on.

Read about it here

Feed does not automatically update

Before the feed manager will update the feed you have to activate the feed you want to automatically be updated. You can change the status in the Feed list with all the feeds you have setup.

The feeds list shows you a table with all the feeds you have created. In the list you see details about the feed like name, feed url, last change date, product total, status and four actions you like edit, view, delete and activate.

Product feed list

Click the “activate” link under Actions in order to activate the feed so it will update itself every given time.

General plugin use

How does woocommerce product feed manager work?

Basically our woocommerce product feed manager will turn your product and data in to a valid product feed. A file with all the products from your shop including all the data about the product like price, link, image, color, type product, category, etc.

Wikipedia: “A product feed or product data feed is a file made up of a list of products and attributes of those products organized so that each product can be displayed, advertised or compared in a unique way”

With this product feed you can sell your product on several different merchant center like Google shopping, Bing, Facebook, etc.

We are very proud that we have build the most flexible and powerful Woocommerce Feed Manager as to date. Our plugin stands out from other feed manager that it is build by Feed marketeers especially for Woocommerce shopping cart platform. The power of our plugin is that you can add the data from your shop to any required, recommended or supported feed attribute. Next to that you are able to alter the data from you wordpress woocommerce database so you can optimize the data you send to Google. We give you controle about the data send to the various merchant selling platforms. You are in control and not at the mercy of Woocommerce or WordPress.

How do i create a feed with individual variations?

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How does the condition editor works?

The condition editor is really powerful and makes it possible to create in almost every situation a perfect product feed and optimize it for your shop and feed performance.

In the next example we are setting up a google feed showing the sales price if it is set and the regular price if the sales price is empty.

You can read this condition als follow:

We show the sales Price in the price attribute if the Sales price is not empty OR we show the Regular price for all other products.

As you can see you can create conditions really easy.

The next little how to clip will walk you through creating a condition created to add a different gender value depending on the value from the product category.

Exclude products with the product Filter.

It’s really easy to use the product filter in our product feed manager. Just add the filter beneath the Category mapping tool by clicking the edit link next to “All products from the selected Shop Categories will be included in the feed” You can create a condition for any woocommerce field there is.

Filter out of stock products

Using the product filter you can easily filter all products that are out of stock. Use the filter function you find just below the Category mapping tool and create a simple condition where you check if the Stock quantity is less than one. Check the screenshot how to do that.

Using the plugin Update schedual

Let the wp product feed manager update your product feed in your webshop so you have the latest updates from your products in the feed.

Where do i find my product feed file?

Google Channel

How to submit feed to Merchant center

You will have to submit the feed URL to your Merchant center. You will find the URL to the feed in your feed manager > Feed list and click the “view” link you find on the right of the list with feeds. It will open de feed in a new browser screen. You can then copy the URL and use that URL in your Merchant center.

To create or edit a schedule for a data feed:

Sign in to your Google Merchant Center account.
From the navigation panel, click Products.
From the page menu, click Feeds to open the feeds page. (Make sure you’ve already registered your feed in your account.)
Click the name of the feed you’d like to schedule.
Click Schedule on the page that loads, and click Edit schedule at the bottom of the page.
Schedule the desired frequency, timing, and location of your feed.
Click Update schedule to save your changes or Update and fetch now to trigger an immediate fetch and upload of the file from the URL specified.

Source: Google Merchant support

I want to use a default brand name in my feed?

When all the products in your shop have the same brand than you do not have to use a brand field. You can easily do this by selecting “fill with static value”

I do not have a GTIN number, how can i create a valid feed?

Google is more strict about the GTIN being required and will start enforcing that as of May 16th, 2016. If your product does have a GTIN number you should use and ad it to the it or Google could reject your products. GTIN applies to all new, in-stock products that have GTIN’s assigned by the manufacturer, in the Google Shopping feeds for the following countries: Australia, Brazil, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, US

If you have products that are missing some unique identifiers like GTIN number you can tell Google this by setting “identifier_exists” to no. If you have a mixed products with and without unique identifiers you can use conditions to set this identifier_exists based on product data.

How to setup shipping settings

The Shipping attributes can be used together with the Google Merchant account shipping settings to help Google provide accurate shipping costs in your Google ads. Learn how to set up Merchant account shipping settings.

Use the shipping setting in the Feed manager only to override the Merchant Center account shipping settings for an individual item. By default, we assume you will use the shipping settings set in your Merchant Center.

If you want to overrule these settings for some reason you can add shipping settings by choosing the right attributes in the “add optional output” dropdown.

In the short how-to video below I give you an example of how to set the shipping price based on the regular product price.

In the example movie I have created the next condition:

shipping price is 5,00 USD if Regular product price is less than 50 USD or Shipping price is 2,00 USD if Regular product price is between 50 and 100 USD or 0 USD for all other products.

If you have setup shipping classes check out this little video about setup the shipping atribute:

If you need more shipping price settings you find them in the “add optional output” dropdown. We support all shipping child elements from Google shopping like:

shipping-price
shipping-country
shipping-region
shipping-service

How do i add a GTIN, Brand or other Unique Product identifier

Woocommerce does not add GTIN, Brand or other Unique identifier fields to the products. Therefor we made it possible to add Unique identifiers to your products with our plugin. Just go to the settings page of our plugin and enable the “Show product identifiers” select box.

Check out the little movie showing you how it works.

Feed issues: invalid or missing required attribute: id

When you got feed errors around the ID attribute the most of the time it is because you do not have SKUs for your products. Because we select SKU as the default value for the ID attribute this if you do not have a valid SKU for all of your products you could end up having errors in your merchant center.

The solution is to select Post ID as the source for the id attribute. Click the (edit) link next to SKU and you can select the Post ID in the source dropdown.