Feed rules are transformations applied to a product catalog before export — mapping internal field names to channel-specific schemas, filtering out ineligible products, enriching data, or applying conditional logic per channel.
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A rule engine sits between the imported catalog and the exported feed. It lets a single source catalog produce many different feeds — one per channel — with channel-specific overrides applied automatically. Without rules, every channel would need its own catalog upload, which defeats the purpose of a feed management platform.
Rules fall into a small number of categories. Mapping rules translate one field to another (catalog "size" to Google "size_system"). Filter rules exclude products that should not be in a feed (out-of-stock, price below threshold, ineligible category for that channel). Enrichment rules add fields the catalog does not have (calculate sale_price from price × discount). Conditional rules apply different transformations based on product attributes (if brand=X then apply rule Y). Order matters — most engines apply rules sequentially, so a filter that depends on enriched data must run after the enrichment.
FeedArc ships 33 rule types covering all four categories, plus specialised rules for title rewriting, image quality scanning, GTIN validation, and channel-specific edge cases (Amazon variation grouping, Meta catalog hierarchy, eMag category mapping). Rules are versioned, ordered, and re-runnable — every export logs which rules fired and what they changed.
Where the concept above breaks down or needs careful application — written honestly so you can make better decisions.
Feed management is the process of collecting product data from an e-commerce store, validating and enriching it against per-channel specifications, and distributing the resulting feeds to advertising channels and marketplaces so the products can be sold across them.
A product feed is a structured file (XML, CSV, TSV, or JSON) that lists every product in your catalog with the fields advertising and marketplace platforms need to display them.
Feed validation is the process of checking a product feed against a channel's schema and rules — required fields, data types, value formats, and business logic — before upload, so errors are caught locally rather than after disapproval.
Custom labels 0 through 4 are five free-text fields in Google Shopping feeds used to segment products for bidding — typically populated from Google Analytics 4 performance data so high-revenue products can be bid on differently from low-revenue ones.
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A diagnostic guide to Google Merchant Center disapprovals: the 12 most common causes, how to fix each one, and how to stop them recurring before re-upload.
Why Google Merchant Center suspends accounts (misrepresentation, policy), how to fix the root cause, complete verification, request a review, and avoid the cool-down trap.
FeedArc handles feed rules — and 31 other feed concerns — automatically. Free to start, no credit card needed.
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