Introduction to CTX Feed Plugin Settings

Product Feed means a file where product information is included. There are a couple of WordPress plugins in the market to generate the product feed. CTX Feed Pro is one of the most used and popular product feed plugins for WooCommerce. CTX Feed Pro provides multiple special features. Dynamic Attribute feature is one of them.

CTX Feed Free

Common Settings

CTX feed setting

1. Product Per Batch

CTX Feed plugin processes the products in small batches to make feed. So that it can make feed for unlimited products. 

By default, the product per batch value is 200. That means if you have 1000 products and products per batch set to 200, the plugin will query and process product information with 5 (1000/200) batches.

Depending on your total product quantity and server capability, you can decrease or increase the product per batch value. You can also decrease the product per batch value if you don’t want to increase your PHP time limit.

Product per batch

2. Product Query Type

WC_Product_Query: With this option, the CTX Feed plugin will query products from the database in a WooCommerce way.

WP_Query: With this option, the CTX Feed plugin will query products from the database in a WordPress way.

Both: With this option, the CTX Feed plugin will query products from the database in both the WooCommerce & WordPress way.

The reason behind this option is some stores bulk upload products using plugins instead of the WooCommerce default product import option. If the bulk upload plugin does not follow the WooCommerce standard to import products, then WC_Product_Query detects the product as a post, and the bulk uploaded products get missing from the feed. So if you are missing any product from the feed or using a very old version of WooCommerce then you can set the Product Query Type to Both.

Product query

3. Variation Query Type

When a store has more product variations than simple products, then you need to set the Variation Query Type to Individual. For example, your site has 4 simple products and 5 variable products. Each variable product has 10 variations. So the total product variation on your database will be 50, and simple products will be 5. In this case, your need to set the Variation Query Type to Individual.

Variation query type

4. Debug Mode

When the debug mode is “ON”, you can see the behind the scene of the feed file processing. You can also see if there are any warnings or errors during or after the feed file generation. By default, debug mode is “OFF”.

During feed generation, this is a step-based workflow. You may want to know what is happening during the feed generation and if there is an error during the time. CTX Feed allows you to download the feed logs file where you can see the feed generation logs.

Debug mode

5. Send Debug Info

If you enable this option, CTX Feed will collect your debug information and send it to our support team so that the support team can understand your site configuration and give you the solution to your issue. Before opening a support ticket you can enable this option. You can also see which information will be collected from your site by clicking the See What We Collect link.

Debug info

6. CTX Feed Cache TTL

CTX Feed plugin uses its own caching system to load the plugin pages faster. With this option, you can set how often the caching data will be updated with the latest info. 6 Hours interval will be the best value for this setting.

To immediately clear the cache, click on the Purge Cache Now option and save the settings. Also you will get a red color Clear Cache button on Make Feed and Manage Feed page to clear the cache immediately.

CTX feed Cache

7. WooCommerce Default Schema Override

By default, the WooCommerce plugin provides product schema to the products page. The old version of WooCommerce had some issues with product schema. So If you are using an old version of WooCommerce (below 4.0) then you need to set the option to On otherwise turn the option Off.

woocommerce default schema

8. Disable/Enable Facebook Pixel

CTX Feed plugin has a built-in Facebook Pixel event tracking feature. You don’t need to use any third-party facebook pixel tracking or Facebook for WooCommerce plugin to track Facebook events.

If you want to enable Facebook pixel supports on your website using the CTX Feed plugin, you can enable the feature. By default the feature is disabled. Also, you have to put your Facebook pixel ID to the very next input here.

Facebook pixel setup

9. Facebook Pixel ID

Put your Facebook pixel ID here. To get your Facebook pixel ID, please follow the article.

Facebook pixel setup

10. Add Shipping/Tax info for all countries to feed (Google Shopping)

There is an option to select the country on the feed configuration page. When you generate a feed using Google Shopping Template, the plugin automatically adds shipping info for that specific country into the feed.

For example, If your feed file is made by selecting the country “USA” then only “USA” based shipping info will be added to the feed.

If you enable the Add Shipping/Tax info for all countries to feed (Google Shopping) option then during feed generation the shipping info will be added for all countries into the feed.

 Add Shipping/Tax info

11. Remove the local pickup shipping zone from feed (Google Shopping)

By default, the shipping attribute gets the shipping without local pickup shipping. If you enable the option, you will get local pickup shipping in the feed file for the shipping attribute.

Remove the local pickup shipping zone

12. Enable FTP Upload

By default, the feature is disabled. If you want to enable the FTP upload feature, just enable it.

Some channels like Google Merchants, Facebook Catalog, and Bing Shopping provide FTP/SFTP servers to upload your feed files to continuously update the product information within a short intervals like 5 to 30 minutes. If you configure your feed into those channels by providing the HTTP/HTTPS feed file URL, then the minimum update interval is 1 hour.

So if you need to update your product information into those channels within shorter intervals (below 1 hour), like 20 minutes, then use their FTP/SFTP feature to configure your feed. Parallelly you need to upload your newly updated feed file to their FTP/SFTP server.

For this, the FTP feature comes with CTX Feed. If you enable this setting, you will get an option on the feed config page to configure your channel-provided FTP access so that the CTX Feed plugin can upload the feed file after generating or updating a feed.

Enable FTP Upload
Enable FTP Feature
Generate product feed
FTP/SFTP Setting tab on the feed configuration page

Custom Fields

CTX Feed plugin has 18 Custom Fields which you can use to extend your product information.

CTX custom fields
CTX Feed Free

You can learn more about custom fields from the below video tutorial:

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