If you have a site that doesn't have WooCommerce installed – how easy would it be to list products? Can you list a bunch of products from another site? Yes you can – and it's actually pretty easy.
The good news is that WooCommerce already has a feed (called an RSS feed) of products that it automatically shares with the public. The great part about this is that even sites that don't use WordPress can access that list. If you are using a WordPress site then there will be a few more tools you can use to grab that list and display it.
Finding the WooCommerce Products RSS Feed
The first step, whether you're running a WordPress site or a non-WordPress site, is to find the RSS feed.
- Go to the page you set as your shop page; that's the page that displays all of your products.
- Now you need to view the source. Any browser can do this. In Google Chrome you can do it through the menu: View -> Developer -> View Source.
- Now you need to look for the Product Feed in the source. There will be a url that you need to copy.
Grab the url from the WooCommerce Product Feed.
Displaying the RSS Feed
This is where is really pays to use WordPress. Displaying an RSS feed is built into WordPress. If you aren't using WordPress then you'll have to find your own solution to display the RSS feed.
- Go to Appearance -> Widgets and select the RSS Widget.
- Configure the widget
- The only required field is the RSS feed url which is what we copied in the first part of this.
- Done!
The WooCommerce product feed displayed in the sidebar on my site.
Never heard of WooCommerce before. But I wanna try it for my site. Many things are out there but I get confused sometimes. Thanks for this.
I am using woocommerce to build online shopping sites, if you have any doubts regarding woocommerce please contact me –
Great post pal but still have a question… what about displaying a feed with pictures and prices? Is it possible?
WordPress doesn’t include the featured image by default but it certainly can. A quick Google search turns this plugin up: https://wordpress.org/plugins/featured-images-for-rss-feeds/
That unfortunately doesn’t work for a shop page :/
I’d reach out to the plugin developer. Shouldn’t be too hard to get it to work with any custom post type.
If I want Displaying the RSS Feed into a html5 web application, what should do I do?
Hey Hosein, WordPress has the functionality to parse and render an RSS feed built in. If you’re building something with HTML5 (and presumably a programming language like PHP as well?) then you’ll have to parse the RSS feed manually. You can probably find a PHP library to get you started.
I don’t see a product feed. Is it controlled by the theme? Any idea how I can enable it?
No this isn’t controlled by the theme. Are you sure you’re using the latest version of WooCommerce?
Yip, definitely have the latest version of WooCommerce.
Hi Patrick,
I manage to display the product feed, only thing is the price is part of the content, so I cant control and style the price separately.
How can one add a function on the source website to wrap the price in its own span with unique class?
This screenshot show my results.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/pf5znskv4to1szu/woocommerce-product-feed.png?dl=0
Thank you
Hey Schalk,
RSS feeds aren’t meant for showing details data like prices, categories, variable images, etc. They only store basic information like the product title, url, description, and author. RSS was made for blog posts.
For your use case I’d leverage the WooCommerce API. I unfortunately don’t think there’s a plugin out there that can do this for you right now so it would probably have to be custom.
For customizations like this I recommend Codeable.
I think woocommerce has a catalog display option. Where you don’t see pricing etc.
I am using the =importfeed() formula in Google Spreadsheets to generate a spreadsheet of my products in WooCommerce.
However I just realized that the feed only has the last 11 items. Is there a “master” feed or a way to have the feed include all items?
Thanks
Hey Brendan,
RSS feeds don’t typically have every item in them. I would instead use the WooCommerce REST API for this.
Didn’t work for me. That line is blank. Any other ideas?
The products feed is blank? There’s probably some other plugin that’s affecting your RSS feeds.
Hi Patrick,
Really interesting post, as I’m trying to find a solution for my wife e-shop to display the feed of new products on her social media. With your explanations I only find the RSS feed for the shop (which is already good), but I would like to use the feed for the new products, which appears nowhere…
Hi Patrick,
The product RSS feed should be in chronological order. If you were to post a new product today it should be at the top of the list.
My shop feed only shows comments on products, not the actual products. Do you think that is because of my theme?
Hi Patrick,
I found your post via Google and was trying to get the product feed of my website. The problem is not finding the feed however it doesn’t work when I add it to my Facebook campaign. I suspect that the problem is that I use a plugin for my woocommerce products (DHVC Woocommerce Products Layouts).
Can you maybe help me with this problem?
Hope to hear from you!
Kind regards,
Leon
Patrick, for some reason, the products RSS doesn’t show up in my source code on my shop page. I am trying to gain access to use for Facebook Pixels. I have WP 4.4.1. Can you tell me why? I was able to pull it up via http://thedarkchocolatebakery.com/feed/?post_type=product
I have the latest version of WordPress and the New v3 of Woocommerce and I can’t get this feed url to work anymore – can you confirm if it is working for you still.
Hey Patrick, great post. I noticed some great questions regarding more in depth RSS feeds from Woo and you mentioned tapping straight into the Woo API. If anyone is looking to tap into prices categories and more of the data entities would we be able to share how devs can use DSYNC to set up RSS feeds? I have just put together a help video for folks that may want to publish in depth RSS feeds.