I have some very large feeds with one having over 800k products. My question is what causes the number of products to be less once added to the site? For example I spent the last 24 hours importing one with 610k products. Late this morning it was at 608k imported and still running. When I woke up it was finished but only 290k were listed on the site. What causes this? Is it duplicates, bad code in the feed file maybe?
Hi Tommy,
For a product to be imported it has to have valid name, price and buy URL fields, and be unique per merchant. Where a full import has completed with significantly less than expected products this is most likely down to duplication and is a common scenario with, for example, clothing merchant feeds where a product name may simply contain "Jumper" but in another field is color so there are 2 records one for "Red Jumper" and one for "Blue Jumper" but because the name field is only "Jumper" only one product is imported.
This can be resolved using filters, most commonly Text Before and Text After, which support pulling in the values of other fields in the feed using place holders. Continuing the example; let's say the color is in a field called COLOR (which you see on Feed Registration Step 2). To make the unique product names Red Jumper and Blue Jumper, you would go to Filters for the feed (Admin home page) and add a new Text Before filter, and in the text box on the configuration page for the filter you would use:
"%COLOR% "
(without the quotes, but note the space on the end which is important!)
Cheers,
David.
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PriceTapestry.com