FeedPrep accepts a wide range of product data file formats. Regardless of the format your supplier provides, FeedPrep will parse the data and make it available for mapping, normalization, and export.
CSV
Comma-separated values files are the most common format for product data feeds. FeedPrep automatically detects the delimiter used in your file, so you do not need to specify it manually. Supported delimiters include:
- Comma (
,) — the standard CSV delimiter - Semicolon (
;) — common in European exports where commas are used as decimal separators - Tab (
\t) — often used in TSV files - Pipe (
|) — sometimes used to avoid conflicts with commas in product descriptions
FeedPrep also auto-detects the character encoding of your file (UTF-8, Windows-1252, ISO-8859-1, etc.), so special characters like accented letters and currency symbols are preserved correctly.
TXT
Plain text files are treated as CSV files with automatic delimiter and encoding detection. If your supplier provides a .txt file that contains structured tabular data, FeedPrep will parse it the same way it handles CSV.
XLS / XLSX
Microsoft Excel files in both legacy (.xls) and modern (.xlsx) formats are supported. By default, FeedPrep reads the first sheet in the workbook. The first row is treated as column headers.
XML
XML files are fully supported, including deeply nested structures. FeedPrep automatically detects the repeating row element in your XML, so you do not need to specify an XPath or row selector.
FeedPrep also supports Google Merchant RSS feeds with namespace prefixes. Elements like g:price, g:brand, and g:product_type are parsed correctly and the namespace prefix is stripped from column names for a clean mapping experience.
The XML parser uses a streaming approach, which means it processes the file incrementally rather than loading the entire document into memory. This allows FeedPrep to handle very large XML feeds efficiently.
File Size and Row Limits
The maximum upload file size is 800 MB. FeedPrep is designed to handle large feeds and can efficiently process files with 200,000+ rows thanks to its streaming parser architecture.
| Format | Extensions | Auto-Detection |
|---|---|---|
| CSV | .csv | Delimiter, encoding |
| TXT | .txt | Delimiter, encoding |
| Excel | .xls, .xlsx | Sheet selection |
| XML | .xml | Row element, namespaces |
If you have a feed in a format not listed here, contact us and we will evaluate adding support for it.