ChannelEngine: adding a feed returns the 'Failed to load feed' error

About this article

This article describes the 'Failed to load feed' error, and how to troubleshoot it.

Troubleshooting

There are a few reasons why your CSV or XML product feed cannot be successfully processed by ChannelEngine, resulting in a 'Failed to load feed' error.

General

The product feed added is not an online resource, but a static file.

To avoid this issue, make sure your product feed is available as a shareable, online resource. For more information on this, check out one of the articles on how to create a product feed.

XML

Wrong product node selected

When using an XML feed, you need to select the node on which products are grouped. More often than not, this node is either called <products> or <items>. In the dropdown to select nodes, all that occur more than once are displayed. If you pick a node with invalid attributes, it might result in errors.

As long as you do not save your selection, you can go back and re-add the feed. If the name of the node changes in your feed, re-add the feed as well – otherwise you may encounter errors.

The XML tags are not closed

If a feed is not properly generated or not all tags are closed correctly, ChannelEngine may have issues when reading the data from the product feed. Check if your feed is generated properly, as in the example below:

<xml> 	<products> 		<product> 			<id> </id> 			<name> </name> 			<stock> </stock> 			<price> </price> 		</product> 		<product> 			<id> </id> 			<name> </name> 			<stock> </stock> 			<price> </price> 		</product> 	</products> </xml> 	

CSV

Multiple possible delimiters

One of the most common problems with new product feeds is that ChannelEngine does not know its delimiter (i.e.: the character that separates columns from each other). When first loading the data, ChannelEngine checks which valid character (e.g.: comma, semi-colon, or tab) appears the most and highlights it in green in the delimiter dropdown.

If the delimiter is a semicolon, but the various attribute values contain more commas than semicolons (such as in product descriptions), the comma is chosen as a delimiter – resulting in errors.

There are only two attributes in the product feed

To determine the correct delimiter in the product feed, all possible delimiter characters are checked. However, if there are only two columns (e.g.: price and stock attributes), they are separated by a single delimiter. Because ChannelEngine checks for delimiters with a minimum count of two, no delimiter is set.

The feed contains unescaped special characters

To troubleshoot this, check out the Formatting and encoding section of the ChannelEngine: product feeds article.

The delimiter has changed, but the product feed title or ID is the same

If you change the delimiter in your product feed and reuse it, instead of adding it as a new feed, the stored delimiter does not change. If you would like to keep using the same product feed because you have a lot of mappings in it, contact ChannelEngine's Support team.