Does your store expose a product feed?
Many checks need to read your catalogue, which requires a public product list. Shopify and WooCommerce provide one; other platforms expose products through their sitemap. This finds what your store offers.
Probes the common feed endpoints for your platform and reports what is public. Saved to your account if you are signed in to a paid plan.
How this check works
Shipwork identifies your platform, then probes the endpoints where a public product list usually lives (Shopify /products.json, WooCommerce's Store API, or the product sitemaps other platforms serve) and reports what it could read. When a feed is found, the catalogue checks run; when it is not, they honestly say so rather than guess.
What the product feed finder looks for
The finder checks whether a store exposes a public product list that the catalogue checks can read. It recognises the Shopify product list at the products JSON endpoint and the WooCommerce Store API, then reports how many products it read. If the platform is not one of those, it reports whether a public product list was found at all.
For a store with no public list, it reports that no feed was found and that catalogue-level checks cannot run. For a site that is not a store, it reports that no product feed is expected. The check reads the list itself, so it does not guess from the visible pages.
How to read a feed result
A found result means the product list answered and the checker could read products from it. The product count tells you how much of the catalogue the price, availability and image checks can see. A missing result on a store means those checks have no data, so their silence is not a clean bill of health.
The check confirms that a public list exists and can be parsed. It does not validate the fields inside it, and it does not read the private feed you send to a merchant platform. A platform that exposes the list but returns incomplete rows will be found here and then fail the catalogue checks later.
Why a public list matters
Catalogue checks such as price, availability, brand, image and description read a machine-readable list of products. Without one, the checker can only inspect the HTML of a few product pages, which is a far narrower view. A store that hides its product list makes its own problems harder to see.
Some platforms expose the list by default, and some disable it. A store that moved platform, changed a theme or restricted an endpoint can lose its list without any visible change on the site. The finder is the first check to run when the catalogue checks return nothing.
How to expose a product feed
On Shopify the product list is normally available at the products JSON path; if it is not, check whether an app or a theme has restricted it. On WooCommerce the Store API answers at its products path under the site; confirm the endpoint is public. On another platform, publish a product sitemap or export a feed file and validate it.
A public list is not the same as your merchant feed, which stays private. The list only needs to expose the fields the checks read. After enabling it, re-run the finder and confirm a product count. Then run feed check to inspect the fields, or feed file check if you export a file.
When to use related checks
Use price check and availability check once the list is found, since both depend on it. Use product page check to review a product page's own signals when no list is available, and feed check for the field-level view.
The guide feed versus page explains why the public list and the page can disagree. If you are not on Shopify or WooCommerce, the site-wide checks still run on HTML and your sitemap, so only the catalogue checks need a list.
Questions
What is a product feed?
Why does Shipwork need one?
My platform is not Shopify or WooCommerce. Can I still be checked?
How do I find my product feed?
Why does Shipwork need a public product list?
Does the finder read my merchant center feed?
Keep reading
What this reads
- Reads public pages from outside your network, the way a crawler does.
- No signup, and nothing is stored on the free checks.
- One of 83 checks across discovery, content, markup, trust and catalogue data.
Cool, just ran an audit and got some insights! Let’s see if I can fix them :)
Whoah! this site is crazy, nothing to roast at all
cool as heck, tried it on my blog and the insights it gave are helpful and not bluff.