Supported Feed Formats

SharpFeed currently supports the following file types for audit:

• CSV (.csv)
• TXT (.txt) – plain text using standard delimiters
• XML (.xml) – Google-compatible product XML feeds

Feed Structure

Regardless of format, your feed must contain a header row (for CSV/TXT) or consistent product tags (for XML). SharpFeed will auto-detect and parse the data accordingly.

• CSV/TXT files:

  • Delimiters automatically detected: , ; | tab
  • First row must be field names (e.g., title, price, image_link)
  • Encoding: UTF-8 recommended

• XML files:

  • SharpFeed looks for <product>, <item>, or <entry> elements
  • Fields inside <g:fieldname> are normalized (see below)
  • Namespaces are stripped automatically for compatibility

Google-style Field Names

You can use either:

• title, description, price, etc.
• Or: g:title, g:description, g:price, etc.

SharpFeed will recognize and normalize both you don’t need to remove the g: prefix manually.

Things to Watch Out For

• Long feeds (10k+ products) take more time to analyze — please be patient.
• Empty or malformed fields (e.g., missing headers, broken tags) may cause audit failures.
• XML feeds must be well-formed, SharpFeed will skip unreadable rows rather than crash.
• Fields like additional_image_link, product_highlight, and product_detail can contain lists, we handle them correctly for validation.

Analysis Time

• Small feeds (<500 products): a few seconds
• Medium feeds (1k–10k products): up to 1 minute
• Large feeds (50k+ products): a few minutes, especially with HTTP checks enabled

💡 Tip: Disable the HTTP status check if you want a faster first audit.

Best Practices

• Stick to Google’s attribute naming
• Keep fields like title, price, description, and image_link clean and consistent
• Use correct formats for fields like price (number currency) or size_system (US, UK, etc.)