Products vs Variants Level Feed | How To Guide

A commonly asked question is how to make a Feed Donkey feed – one record/ row per product – here’s now.

Some channels will require that you structure your feed at a products level. By default Feed Donkey will output a row per individual unique SKU record – in other words a variants level feed.

The way we will control this is using the Filters function. In short we add an INCLUDE filter that only allows a row to be included where the variants position value = 1.

This rule would look like the above.

In Shopify product structure terms, they do not distinguish very strictly between products with multiple variants, and ‘singular’ products. All created products have both product level and variant level data associated with them.

A singular product will have a single ‘variant’, and to bring us back to the method we’re presenting – this will always have a variant position value of 1.

So every product will have this, whether singular or multiple variations – and if we only include this, we will have one record per product and in effect a ‘products level’ feed structure.

If we are building this way there are some considerations of course. If you are including a variants level data source field in this configuration.

So take this small amount of example product data from a real database that I have anonymised. Here you are looking at a mixed list of products – the multi-variant products are highlighted green.

If we were to apply that filter we would only be allowing the inclusion where variant position equals 1..

So for example for the first variant product in that list – if you were including variant level inventory – this would relate specifically to the 1st variant SKU only.. here showing a stock quantity of 8

So this would be incorrect to use in a products level feed .. the sum of the inventory for all variants being 57

However, this is not to exclude the use of any variant level data. Take the price (which is always a variants level data source)

Here, none of the variant options make a different to the items selling price, so it is fine to use a variant level field in your products level structured feed.

Hope this helps & happy feed building