Distributr

Distributr

Distributr turns your catalogue into the file a marketing channel expects and publishes it at a web address that never changes. You set up one feed per channel and market; Cockpit reads your storefront on a schedule, writes the file, and the channel downloads it whenever it likes. Open Distributr from the project sidebar.

A feed reads the same storefront your visitors see, not the shop system behind it. So a product that is hidden, out of stock, or priced differently for one market appears that way in the feed too.

How it fits together

Three things shape what the file contains. The column mapping says which column carries what. The field bindings say where your particular shop keeps each value. The market values supply the things that are your decision rather than a fact about a product — what delivery costs, for instance.

Channels

Each channel comes with a ready template: the columns that channel asks for, named the way it reads them, in the order it expects.

Templates follow each channel's own published specification — including the column names that look misspelled but are not. idealo really does read decription, and correcting it breaks the import.

Creating a feed

Create feed asks for the basics. The feed arrives with its channel's mapping already filled in, so it can generate before you change anything.

• Channel — decides the columns, the file type, and whether each row is a product or a variant.
• Market — decides which catalogue, prices and currency the feed reads.
• Storefront endpoint — the address your storefront answers on, for example https://shop.example.com.
• Locale — the language the feed is written in. Defaults to the market's.
• Currency — leave empty to use the market's own.
• Format — leave empty to use the channel's own. Only change it if your channel account expects something else.
• Encoding — UTF-8, unless the channel account expects otherwise.
• Refresh — how often the feed regenerates on its own.

The feed address

Every feed has a public Feed address, shown on its page with a copy button. You can hand it to a channel before the feed has ever run — which matters, because setting up a channel account starts with pasting a URL.

The address contains a long random token, so nobody can guess it from your project or market name. Each run replaces the file behind that address; the address itself never changes.

Column mapping

A feed's page lists its columns in a table you can edit, reorder and extend. Each column has:

• Channel column — the heading the channel reads. Rename it only if your account expects something different.
• Source field — which value from your catalogue fills it.
• Transform — how that value is turned into what the channel accepts: a price with its currency, an availability word from that channel's own list, a category path with the right separator.
• Constant — a fixed value written into every row, whatever the product says.
• Fallback — used only when everything above comes out empty.
• Prefix / suffix — text wrapped around the result, such as a unit.

Where a field lives

A template asks for a field by name — gender, gtin, taxonomy — without saying where your shop keeps it, because every shop keeps it somewhere different. You answer that once per project, as a channel input binding, and every feed that needs the field uses it.

Cockpit suggests the fields your storefront actually returned for a real product, so you are picking from things that exist and are filled in.

Leaving a field unbound is not fatal. The feed still generates, that column is empty, and the run tells you which one.

Market values

Some values are a decision rather than a fact about a product. They belong to the market, and every feed of that market uses them.

• Ships to — the country a delivery offer applies to. Without it the offer is left out entirely, because a delivery price with no country applies nowhere.
• Service name — what to call the delivery service, for example Standard.
• Shipping rate and Free above — what delivery costs, and the order value above which it is free.
• Decimal separator and Category separator — what your channel account expects in a price and in a category path.
• New for and Top seller from — how long a product counts as new, and the sales figure above which it is a top seller.
• Reference — small dictionaries that translate your shop's own words into a channel's. Your shop says Damen; Google wants female, and nothing can work that out on its own.

Which products go in

A feed can require products to be in stock or to have an image, set a minimum price, and add conditions on any other field. Separately, an exclusion list removes individual products by SKU — for the handful of items no rule would ever describe.

Whatever a rule removes is counted, rule by rule. So if a feed suddenly has half the products, you can see which rule did it.

Running a feed

A feed regenerates on its Refresh interval, and you can also run one by hand from the list or from the feed itself. A manual run asks you to confirm: a large catalogue takes minutes, cannot be stopped once it starts, and reads your live storefront while it is serving shoppers.

If a run is interrupted it continues from where it stopped instead of starting over, and a feed that is already running will not start a second time. The list shows progress in the row, so you can tell a long run from a stuck one without opening it.

When several feeds of the same market come due together, they share a single read of the catalogue. Five channels cost one pass over your products, not five.

What a run tells you

The run log names exactly what it is talking about:

• a column the channel requires that came out empty;
• a column only your channel account can fill — a marketplace's own category number lives in that account, and no catalogue has it. This is what gets a file rejected on the first upload, and nothing else warns you about it;
• two rows with the same ID, which a channel reads as one product replacing the other;
• a link that would have been a slug instead of a full address;
• which parts of your catalogue the run asked for — the first thing to check when a column is unexpectedly empty.

If a run had to leave something out, it says so. If it could not start at all, it says why.

Product links

Most channels need a web address for every product. Cockpit builds it from your own product page setup, so it matches where a visitor would actually land.

If your product pages are set up in an unusual way, you can write the address pattern yourself in Product URL — https://shop.example.com/p/{slug} — and that is used as-is. Leave it empty and Cockpit works the address out for you.