Build a Live Product Feed in Google Sheets

A Google Sheet is the quickest way to get products, services or experiences into a guide when you have no webshop feed to point at. It behaves like any other feed URL: Roccai reads it, maps the columns to product-card fields, and with auto-update on, fetches it again each night. Change a price in the sheet today, and the guide shows the new price tomorrow morning.

A sheet is the right source when:

• Your products don't live in a webshop; courses, services, rooms, experiences, articles.
• You want a hand-picked selection rather than everything in your store.
• You want colleagues who don't have Roccai access to keep the products current.

If you do have a Shopify or WooCommerce store, use the real feed instead, it stays in sync with stock and prices on its own.

Before you start

• A Google account that is allowed to publish a sheet to the web. Some Workspace domains block this — ask your IT admin if the option is greyed out.
• A public image URL for each product. Images stored in Google Drive or on an intranet won't load in the guide.
• Nothing confidential in the sheet. Publish to the web makes that tab readable by anyone with the link; cost prices, supplier names and internal notes don't belong in it. Keep those in a separate sheet.

Step 1 — Build the sheet

Put the column names in row 1 and one product per row below. Nothing above the column names — no sheet title, no merged cells, no logo. Roccai reads the very first line as the column names, so a title row makes your headings the product data.

Name the columns exactly like this and Roccai will recognise them by itself:

Three things that trip people up:

• Tags are split on commas — and also on +, >, /, ; and |. So gift, jul, under 300 becomes three tags, and a tag containing one of those characters will be broken in two.
• The image URL must be the image itself, not the page it sits on. Right-click an image on your website and choose "Copy image address".
• Keep the header row stable. Add and remove rows as much as you like, but renaming or reordering columns means re-mapping the feed in Roccai.

One trick worth knowing: give several columns the same name and Roccai merges them into a list. Three columns all called imageUrl give the product three images.

Step 2 — Publish the sheet to the web as CSV

This is the step people skip. A normal share link gives Roccai a web page, not data, it has to be a published CSV link.

1. In your sheet, open File → Share → Publish to web.
2. In the Link tab, pick the tab with your products in the left drop-down (not "Entire document").
3. In the right drop-down, choose Comma-separated values (.csv).
4. Click Publish and confirm.
5. Copy the link it gives you. It looks like https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-…/pub?gid=0&single=true&output=csv — it must end in output=csv.

Leave the sheet published. If you ever click Stop publishing, the link dies and the nightly sync stops finding your products.

Step 3 — Add the link in Roccai

1. Open your guide and go to Product Setup.
2. On the Source step, choose Via Link — not Via CSV Or JSON File, which is for a one-off upload that never updates.
3. Paste the published link into Product Feed URL.

Step 4 — Turn on Auto-Update Product Feed

Open Advanced Settings under the URL field and switch on Auto-Update Product Feed. Roccai then fetches the sheet again every night, around 02:00, and updates the products in your guide.

Only link feeds can do this — it is the reason to choose Via Link over a file upload. The setting is saved when you confirm the feed at the end of the flow.

Step 5 — Detect Data and map the fields

1. Click Detect Data. Roccai reads the sheet and works out what each column is.
2. On Map fields, check the two tabs. Products attributes holds Id (Required), Status, Product Group Id and Tags. Products content holds Title, Subtitle, Text, Image URL, Link (Required), Price and Sale Price.
3. Anything Roccai didn't match itself, pick from the drop-down. Anything you don't want on the card, set to “-”.
4. For Status, choose the column and type the value that means in stock — for example in stock — into the box next to it.
5. For Tags, the yellow chips under the drop-down are a live preview of the tags from your sheet. Use Add Additional Tag if you keep tags in more than one column, and Display name to relabel a tag group for shoppers.
6. Continue to Select, choose whether to import everything or only certain tags, and confirm.

When your edits show up

Google also caches a published sheet for a few minutes, so a change you make right before a sync can land the following night instead. It is a feed, not a live spreadsheet view.

Troubleshooting

Danish and other special characters

Æ, ø, å and accented letters come through as long as the sheet is published from Google Sheets itself — it always publishes UTF-8. If you paste a CSV from Excel into a sheet first, check that the letters still look right before you publish.

New to product feeds? Start here →