Merchant Feeds

Overview

Howl provides the ability for our publisher partners to download merchant feeds in a standardized format for monetization. This enables product data to be integrated into your CMS, allowing for more control over monetization decisions and integration of multi-button formats.

Feed Schema

Please note: all fields are nullable due to incomplete and/or inapplicable data. The feeds will only include products that are in-stock at time of file generation.

Field Name	Type	Description
brand	String	Name of product brand
colors	List<string>	List of colors for the product (if applicable)
currency	String	Currency code of price
description	String	Description of the product
google_product_category	List<string>	List of Google Product categories for this product
gtin	String	Global trade item number; a unique product identifier
image_url	String	URL of product image
item_group_id	String	ID for a group of Item IDs
item_id	String	Individual Item ID
manufacturer	String
model	String
mpn	String
name	String	Product name
price	Float	Regular price of product
sale_price	Float	Sale price of product
sizes	List<string>	List of sizes for the product (if applicable)
sku	String	Stock keeping unit; a unique product identifier to specific retailer
store_page_url	String	Product page URL

Formatting

Please make note of below formatting standards when ingesting the product feeds:

• All headers are wrapped in double quotes

• All string type fields are wrapped in double quotes

• All empty fields are denoted by empty double quotes

Feed Delivery

Howl supports two methods of feed delivery:

Amazon S3: Feeds will be delivered in a shared S3 bucket configured to have a sub-folder for each merchant.

If the publisher has their own AWS account, we will configure a shared S3 bucket that can be owned by either party. Access will be managed using IAM roles.

If the publisher does not have their own AWS account, we will configure a shared S3 bucket accessed by secret key & access key. Credentials will be shared in a 1pass vault for security purposes.

SFTP: Feeds will be delivered to publisher’s SFTP location.

Configuring the URLs

Product URLs contained in feed must be wrapped in our click wrapper (Clickmate) before publishing to the site. This ensures the link is properly monetized with Howl tracking appended on click.

Publisher JS Tag

It is recommended to add our Publisher JS Tag for this integration method. The JSTag allows for real-time optimization utilizing dynamic links and dynamic button displays as detailed in the linked documentation page. Additionally, the JS Tag unlocks higher rates by enabling impressions tracking and post-impression attribution.

Getting Started

Please contact your account manager or support@planethowl.com and we will reach out with next steps.