The first thing you need to do is import a data feed. In our case, these will mostly be product feeds from Magento (XML files). But it is also possible to import your own CSV file, TXT file or a Google spreadsheet, for example. 
After the feed is set up, you can customise your feed for different channels.

After you have created a Channable account, you can immediately start importing your product feed.

By default, you can choose from an XML file, CSV file, TXT file, JSON file or a Google sheet. If you click on "new link" you will be shown additional choices.

For this blog, we used a JSON file: You enter the name for your feed and the URL of your file.

After this, you will see an overview with all the fields found in the passed feed:

You can map and indicate the fields. If you don't want to import a field, you can also indicate that here.

After the feed import is complete, you can see the products you just loaded under Items:

You can easily set which columns you want to see here. If you want to see if a particular product is in your feed, you can search for the product via the search bar.

You can create master rule groups in Channable that you can reuse for multiple feeds. The advantage of this is that you can put rules, which recur frequently, in a group. This way, you only have to adjust the rule once, and not per feed.

This can be useful, for instance, if you only want to show certain products in a certain season. For example, do you have a summer and winter collection? Then you can use this set of rules to quickly set up that only the winter collection is shown in winter and only the summer collection in summer.

Do delivery times change around Christmas or other holidays? You can also quickly adjust this via the master rules, so you don't have to check for each feed separately.
The operation of the master rules corresponds to the operation of the feed-specific rules, which we will come back to later.

Now that the items have been loaded into Channable, you can start creating feeds for different channels. There are already quite a few preset channels available:

You can also specify here which master rule group you want to use.
We will use the preset Facebook Shops feed as an example.

Configuration

After you have created a new feed, it needs to be configured. In the configuration, you can specify which country this feed is for and which type of market it will be used for.
You can give the feed a name and specify which master rule group to use.

Security Settings

In the security settings, you can specify whether an action should happen if there is a big difference in the items that were in the feed and the items that will appear in the newly generated feed.
You can then have the feed update blocked and send a notification. You can also choose to receive only a notification or take no action.

A difference can occur if, for example, something went wrong when loading the master feed from the web shop, or if a whole section of items is suddenly sold out during the sales period, but also think of a new collection that is added to the website.
You can indicate what action to take in case of a negative difference and what action to take in case of a positive difference.

SFTP settings

You can also have your feed uploaded to an SFTP server, instead of receiving the feed URL, the feed will be uploaded directly to your own server.

Categorising products

Product categorisation ensures that the products in your feed can be linked to the export platform's categories.

Smart categorisation

Recently, Channable rolled out Smart categorisation. This links items to a category using a machine learning algorithm. This feature can currently only be used for channels that use Google categories (for example: Goolge Shopping, Bol.com).

Manual categories

You can set the manual categories by adding rules.
You can add 2 types of rules for this, one that checks for one field (ALS condition) or a rule that checks for 2 fields (AND condition)..

Setting rules

In this section, you can set the rules to be used specifically for this feed.
First you need to give the rule a name, then you can start setting everything.

As an example, we will create a rule that searches for all products containing the word 'tent'. After this, we are going to see if the tent is a 2 person tent. If it is then we want to add '- 2 persons' to the product title. The rule will then look like this:

On the right side of the screen, you can click on 'selected items' to see which items are affected by this rule.

There are a lot of options with the rules, e.g. you can merge fields, store values in a certain field, remove products from the feed. With multiple rules, you can also change the order of these rules on the left-hand side, you can also disable certain rules.

More information on setting these rules can be found here.

Complete feed

When all fields are correct click 'save & run', the feed will now be generated.

Feed quality

Here you can see the quality of your feed. The score of our feed is 51, a score we could still improve. Channable also indicates here what can be improved. The best thing, of course, is to get as high a score as possible with your feed.

View your feed

• With Channable, you save a lot of time by creating and managing all product feeds in one place. You can create several feeds in a short time and forward them to the right channels.

• More than 2,500 feed templates are available to increase your online reach and visibility.

• Using smart filters, you can quickly customise your product feed to always meet the channels' requirements.

• You can set how often the feed should be refreshed and Channable takes care of this for you. Does something go wrong retrieving the product feed? Then you get a notification from Channable so you can fix it quickly.

• Use master rules when setting up your feed, you can maintain them in one place and don't have to add them to each feed separately.