After creating and previewing your feed to ensure that your data is optimized for the targeted site your next step is to activate the feed. You will then need to take steps to validate your feed at its destination and finally you will need to go through and resolve any errors that have been generated on your feed.  
 

Prerequisites

The following topics should be reviewed before completing this task

• Shopping and Flex Feeds Getting Started Guide  

Media

•  Submitting a Feed - In this video you will learn how to ensure your feed is active, how to submit your feed manually and how to validate your feed has been received by the Provider. View the Transcript of this Video.

Tasks to Complete

Previewing Your Feed

It is always a best practice to preview the information you will be sending to any provider.

1. Navigate to your Feeds > Product Mapping > Feeds view. 
2. Click into an existing feed. 
3. Enter your email address
4. Select the Create a Full Feed Preview button
5. Depending on the size of your feed, it may take some time to complete your preview feed.  Once your preview feed is ready, you will receive an email address notification.
6. You may access your feed preview on the Feed History page.

Activating/Deactivating Your Feed

If you have completed all of the necessary feed configurations you will have the option to activate your feed. A Feed can be activated or deactivated in three ways.

• Activate/Deactivate via the Feed Setup Guide 
1. Navigate to your Feeds > Product Mapping > Feeds view. 
2. Click into an existing feed. 
3. Go to the Preview/Summary section of the feeds guide.
4. Select the Activate or Deactivate button.
    
• Activate/Deactivate via the Feeds View 
1. Navigate to your Feeds > Product Mapping > Feeds view.
2. Take note of the Status column which shows the status of your feeds. 
3. For feeds that are currently inactive, you can choose the   icon under the actions column to activate the feed. 
4. Similarly, for feeds that are currently active, you can choose the   icon under the actions column to deactivate the feed.
    
• Submit a Feed Manually via the Feeds View 
1. Navigate to your Feeds > Product Mapping > Feeds view.
2. Choose the select box next to the feed that you wish to manually Submit. 
3. Choose the Submit button on that view.  This will send the feed within a half hour to the feed destination.

Validating a Feed

After you have made your feed Active, it will be sent to the site configured in your Feed Info section.  Be sure to login to the site destination to validate that the feed was received and can be processed.  If there are errors you will want to resolve them and re-send your feed. 

Please allow at least 24 hours for the destination to process your feed and post items. Each destination will have a different time-frame on when the feed will be live on their site. You must let them know that you're passing a new feed from ChannelAdvisor to them, so they will refresh their site with the new feed.