New integrations
As of May 2021, all new integrations are required to use [API based catalog feed management](🔗) to send data and perform index updates.
All Bloomreach products require a daily product feed.
## What's a product feed?
The contents of your product catalog constitute your product feed. Your product feed provides critical information that Bloomreach technology needs to act on your content. You can deliver your feed to a Bloomreach FTP site.
It's important that you include all of your products when you generate your product feed. If your product doesn't exist in your feed, then Bloomreach can't act on it.
## Format and delivery
Bloomreach supports CSV, TSV and XML feeds encoded as UTF-8. You can also use your [Google Base feed](🔗). Most of Google's fields overlap with Bloomreach's fields, making alignment quick and easy.
You can deliver your product feed daily to a Bloomreach-provided FTP location, using ftp.bloomreach.com and the credentials that your Bloomreach representative gives you with your integration package. For SFTP access, we can use your public RSA keys.
### Frequency
Generate your product feed daily to keep your data fresh and reflective of your current inventory.
Feed Attribute Sync Time
When you add new attributes/categories to the feed, it takes around 1.5 hours for them to reflect on the dashboard. You can add customisations to the new attributes/categories after this sync time.
### Requirements
Use CSV, TSV or XML format.
Use [UTF-8 encoding](🔗).
Use [gzip](🔗) compression.
Name the file ProductCatalog_YYYYMMDD.xml.gz or ProductCatalog_YYYYMMDD.tsv.gz.
Update the value of **YYYYMMDD** in the filename.
Deliver the feed to ftp.bloomreach.com or through another pre-arranged delivery mechanism.
## XML feeds
If your product feed is in XML, then you need to decide if it's a flat feed or a variant feed. A **flat feed** is composed of products that don't have SKUs inside. A **variant feed** is composed of products with individual SKUs nested inside.
XML feeds cannot have both variants and products that don't have SKUs inside. That is, you cannot combine the flat feed and variant feed formats. However, you can nest SKU fields in your products in a flat feed.
Some fields accept multiple values, such as crumbs. If your feed is in XML, then we recommend that you use separators, and send these values all in a single path.
## Single view and Multi-view
The feed differs depending on whether you have a single view or a multi-view feed. **Multi-view** feeds use a view ID field to filter the catalog to only show specific products that you want a particular site visitor or subsite within your account to see, while a single view feed does not use the view ID field. You can read more about [multi-view feeds here](🔗).
## XML feed templates
## Do Bloomreach Dashboard changes affect the product feed?
No, changes made in the Bloomreach Dashboard do not change your product feed. Your product feed is based on your product catalog. We don't alter that content.
Instead, we store the rules that your business users create when they use the Bloomreach Dashboard. We apply these rules for each request independently without overwriting your feed.