Project Overview
In December 2023, I developed a custom CSV product feed for Naturfroh, designed for use with the ADCELL affiliate network.
The goal was to create a reliable, automatically generated product export that could provide publishers with structured product information while following ADCELL’s technical and data requirements.
The resulting feed is available at:
The CSV export is still working correctly today.
The Challenge
For affiliate and product-publishing platforms, simply exporting products to CSV is not enough.
The feed needs to contain the right product information in a predictable structure so that the receiving platform can process the data correctly.
The ADCELL requirements specified a range of product attributes, including:
- Product deeplink
- Product name
- Short and long product descriptions
- Gross and net prices
- Currency
- EAN
- Manufacturer information
- Product and thumbnail image URLs
- Product category and category ID
- Shipping costs
- Availability
- Delivery time
- Product contents
- Basic price information where legally required
The ADCELL documentation also identifies mandatory fields that must be present in the product feed.
This meant the solution had to do more than generate a basic product list—it needed to produce structured data suitable for an external advertising and affiliate ecosystem.
The Solution
I developed a dedicated CSV feed endpoint for Naturfroh.
The feed was designed around ADCELL’s specified CSV structure and technical requirements.
The documented technical format included:
- UTF-8 or ISO-8859-15 encoding
- Semicolon (
;) column separator - Double quotes as text delimiters
- Line breaks between records
- Column headers in the first row
- Product records beginning from the second row
The implementation therefore focused on generating consistently structured product data rather than relying on a manually maintained spreadsheet.
Product Data Mapping
A key part of the project was mapping the available product information into the fields expected by ADCELL.
The feed structure accommodates important information such as:
Product identification
- Product deeplink
- Product name
- EAN
- Vendor item number
- Manufacturer
- Manufacturer article number
Commercial information
- Gross price
- Net price
- Strike price
- Currency
Product presentation
- Product description
- Long description
- Product image
- Thumbnail
- Product category
- Category ID
Delivery information
- Shipping costs
- Availability
- Delivery time
The ADCELL specification identifies the core mandatory fields required for a usable product feed.
Handling Pricing and Currency
Product pricing is particularly important in an affiliate feed because inconsistent formatting can cause problems during import.
The ADCELL specification supports several recognized price formats and requires each data row to represent pricing in a single currency.
The feed therefore needed to provide pricing information in a format that could be reliably interpreted by the receiving system.
Google Shopping and Basic Price Data
The ADCELL requirements also cover basic-price information for products where applicable.
For products sold in the EU, the documentation specifies requirements around basic price, unit and content information, including supported units such as:
- kg
- l
- cm
- m
- sqm
- ct
It also specifies formatting rules for numerical values and unit combinations.
This is an important consideration when developing product feeds intended for use beyond a simple affiliate product list.
Result
The completed feed provided Naturfroh with a dedicated, machine-readable product export for ADCELL.
Feed:
https://www.naturfroh.com
Development: December 2023
Current status: The CSV export is still working correctly.
The long-term availability of the feed demonstrates the value of creating a dedicated automated export rather than preparing a one-time CSV file manually.
Technical Takeaway
This project is a good example of how a relatively simple-looking CSV requirement can involve several layers of technical work:
Product database → Data mapping → Formatting → Validation → CSV generation → External platform consumption
A successful product feed needs to consider both the source data and the requirements of the receiving platform.
In this case, the implementation was built around ADCELL’s documented requirements for product fields, CSV structure, pricing and product information.
What I Can Build
I can develop similar custom product feeds and data integrations for:
- Affiliate networks
- Product comparison websites
- Advertising platforms
- Google Shopping
- Marketplaces
- Real-estate portals
- XML/RSS consumers
- Custom APIs
- CSV/Excel imports
- Automated data synchronization
If your platform has a specific feed specification, I can map the existing website or database data to the required format and create an automated feed endpoint.
Need a custom XML, RSS, CSV or API integration?
Contact me at contact@wp2xml.com.
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