ChannelEngine: create a product feed using Microsoft Excel

About this article

This article describes how to use Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to create a product feed.

Table of contents

Introduction

Create a file

Publish the feed on the Web

Set up the product feed on ChannelEngine

Introduction

There are different ways to upload and update product information on ChannelEngine, such as via a content management system (CMS), enterprise resource planning (ERP), webshop, etc. If you do not use such as system or are unable to add all the required product information to it, a good alternative is to add to ChannelEngine using Microsoft Excel.

Create a file

This guide does not include steps on how to create a Microsoft account. If you do not have a Microsoft account, you can follow these steps.

To create a spreadsheet in Microsoft Office, perform the following steps:

1. Sign in to Microsoft Office using your Microsoft account.

2. If you have already created an Excel file to use as a feed, drag and drop that spreadsheet onto the Office canvas to upload and open it. If not, create a new spreadsheet file.

3. Add at least one column for your Merchant product number/SKU to the spreadsheet.

4. If you are unsure of the correct identifier used as the Merchant product number, look up the product on ChannelEngine.

5. Once you finish setting up the columns and rows, save the Excel spreadsheet as a CSV or TSV file (comma-separated values or tab-separated values) to be read as a feed. Make sure that every attribute has a column in the sheet.

Publish the feed on the Web

You can use OneDrive to create a public link that provides ChannelEngine access to your product feed spreadsheet. ChannelEngine can use this public file link to update your product feed.

To create a public link to your spreadsheet, do the following:

1. Open your OneDrive folder and find the file for which you want to create a public link.

2. Click the Show actions icon (three-dot menu) at the extreme right end, and select Share. Alternatively, you can right-click the file and click Share to open the access settings.

3. Click the Anyone with the link can edit option to define your link settings.

4. In the Link settings window, choose who you want to provide with access to the spreadsheet. Either select Anyone with the link or enter specific email addresses.

5. Under Other settings, deselect Allow editing if you want anyone with the link to view the file but not edit it, and click Apply. Note that the Allow editing option is selected by default.

6. Once done, click the Copy link icon.

7. In the resulting window, verify the details and click Copy.

8. To convert the copied file link into a downloadable link, remove all the characters after the question mark (?) and add download=1 as a suffix. E.g.: the link https://1drv.ms/x/s!Agccc_7a33xmbw7ESmlLVeI7sgw?e=BZZXKD looks as follows when converted https://1drv.ms/x/s!Agccc_7a33xmbw7ESmlLVeI7sgw?download=1

Set up the product feed on ChannelEngine

For a complete guide on setting up a product feed on ChannelEngine, refer to the ChannelEngine: product feeds article. Below are a few steps to set this up by using the previous example feed. The exact procedure and complexity may vary depending on your setup.

1. Go to Products, Product feeds and select + Add feed to add a new product feed.

2. Paste the downloadable feed link you generated from step 8 in the previous section into the Feed textbox.

3. Choose the correct delimiter and click Continue. If you select CSV, the delimiter is a comma. On the other hand, if you choose TSV, it is a tab.

4. Under Settings, enable the Additional? option if it is an additional feed that intends to update attributes of existing products (e.g.: stock, content, etc.).

5. If you used column names that reflect or resemble the terms used by ChannelEngine, the expected attributes may already be pre-selected. You can identify them by the green highlight and the light bulb icon. If not, select the correct attributes from the Microsoft Excel feed.

Once ChannelEngine maps everything correctly, click Save to store the new feed and its mappings. You must perform an import before the new data is reflected on ChannelEngine.