Feed Scheduling and Auto Refresh in Feed Operations
> Feed scheduling is the process of configuring automated intervals at which a product feed is regenerated from the current catalog state and the hosted feed URL content is updated — a live feature in FeedBridge that keeps all five feed format outputs current without manual intervention, with configurable refresh intervals matched to the merchant's catalog change frequency.
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What Is Feed Scheduling?
Feed scheduling is the configuration of automated, recurring refresh cycles that regenerate a merchant's product feed files from the current state of their product catalog and update the content served at their hosted feed URLs. Rather than requiring a merchant to manually export and re-upload a feed file each time prices change, products are added, or inventory levels shift, a scheduled feed refresh performs this regeneration automatically at the configured interval.
In product feed operations, the freshness of the feed — how closely it reflects the actual current state of the merchant's catalog — directly affects how accurately the downstream channel displays and transacts on the merchant's products. A feed that was last refreshed three days ago may contain prices that have since changed, products that have since been added or discontinued, and availability statuses that no longer reflect live inventory. Each discrepancy between the feed and the live catalog is a potential point of failure in the buyer's journey — a price that differs at checkout, an out-of-stock product still shown as available, a new product that hasn't yet appeared on the AI surface.
Feed auto-refresh solves this by making the regeneration cycle automatic and predictable. The merchant configures the interval once; the system executes the refresh on that schedule without further input. The hosted feed URL remains stable while the content it serves is updated at each refresh — meaning AI platforms, shopping channels, and marketplaces always fetch current data from the same registered address.
FeedBridge supports feed scheduling and configurable auto-refresh intervals as a live feature, applied across all five hosted feed format outputs: ACP JSON-LD, UCP Interactive Protocol, Google Merchant Center CSV, Meta Commerce Manager CSV, and Amazon Inventory File TSV.
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How Feed Scheduling Works
The feed scheduling workflow in FeedBridge follows a consistent operational pattern:
1. Catalog state is the source. The feed is generated from the current state of the merchant's product catalog in FeedBridge — including all enrichment, pricing, availability, variant data, and trust signals that have been applied to each product record.
2. Refresh interval triggers regeneration. At the configured refresh interval, FeedBridge's feed generation pipeline regenerates all feed format files from the current catalog state. This includes re-running field mappings, format normalisations, and validation checks for each output format.
3. CDN cache is updated. The newly generated feed files are served from FeedBridge's CDN infrastructure, updating the cached content at each brand's hosted feed URLs. The URLs themselves remain unchanged; only the content at those URLs is updated.
4. Feed health is checked. After each refresh, feed health monitoring validates the generated output — checking for dead product URLs, field validity issues, and structural conformance. If issues are detected, the feed alert preferences system sends the merchant an email notification.
5. Downstream channels fetch the updated feed. AI platforms and marketplaces that have registered the FeedBridge-hosted feed URL as their data source will retrieve the updated content at their own polling schedule — which is independent of FeedBridge's refresh schedule, but benefits from the feed being current at each fetch.
The key operational characteristic of this model is that the merchant does not need to take any action for each catalog update to propagate to all downstream channels. Once scheduling is configured, the pipeline runs automatically.
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Configurable Refresh Intervals
FeedBridge's feed scheduling feature supports configurable auto-refresh intervals — meaning the refresh frequency is not fixed at a single system-wide cadence but can be set to match the merchant's catalog change rate. This matters because catalog change frequency varies significantly across merchant types:
- High-frequency catalogs: Merchants in categories with frequent price changes (electronics, fashion, fast-moving consumer goods) or volatile inventory (limited-edition products, event tickets, perishables) need frequent feed refreshes to keep pricing and availability current. More frequent refresh cycles reduce the window during which the feed diverges from the live catalog.
- Stable catalogs: Merchants with slowly changing catalogs (handmade goods, bespoke products, B2B equipment) have less need for high-frequency refresh. For these merchants, a less frequent refresh interval is operationally sufficient and avoids unnecessary regeneration cycles.
- Event-driven catalogs: Some merchants have catalogs that are stable for extended periods but change significantly at specific moments — a seasonal sale launch, a new product line introduction, or a bulk price update. For these merchants, the scheduled refresh interval handles routine updates; triggered refresh mechanisms (see Shopify and WooCommerce sync below) handle the event-driven moments.
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Shopify and WooCommerce Sync
For merchants whose product catalog lives in a Shopify or WooCommerce store, FeedBridge's store integration layer provides a direct synchronisation path between the store's product data and the FeedBridge catalog. Both Shopify Sync and WooCommerce Sync are live integrations in FeedBridge.
Store sync works alongside feed scheduling rather than replacing it:
- Shopify Sync connects the merchant's Shopify store to FeedBridge, enabling product catalog import and sync. When products are updated in Shopify — prices adjusted, new variants added, products published or unpublished — those changes can be synced into the FeedBridge catalog, which then propagates to all hosted feed outputs at the next scheduled refresh.
- WooCommerce Sync provides the equivalent API-based catalog import for WooCommerce stores. WooCommerce product data is imported into FeedBridge's normalised catalog structure, where it can be enriched, scored, and included in feed outputs.
FeedBridge also supports a configurable webhook system — allowing event-based notifications to trigger actions when specific events occur in connected systems. Webhooks can support more responsive sync patterns for merchants whose store integration generates webhook events on product updates.
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The Real-Time Sync Gap
Real-time inventory sync — where a price or availability change in the merchant's store is pushed to the hosted feed URL within seconds — is a known gap in FeedBridge's current capabilities. It is listed as a high-priority roadmap item as of April 2026 and is not yet live.
This gap is most significant for merchants in categories where inventory and pricing change minute-to-minute: live event ticketing, flash sales, perishable goods, and other high-velocity inventory scenarios. For these merchants, even a short-interval scheduled refresh may not be frequent enough to keep availability status current — a product that sells out between feed refreshes will continue to appear as `in_stock` in the feed until the next refresh cycle completes.
The current recommended approach for merchants with high-velocity inventory is to configure the most frequent available refresh interval in FeedBridge's feed scheduling settings, minimising the window of divergence between the live catalog and the feed content. When the real-time webhook-based inventory sync feature becomes available on the roadmap, it will replace the need for frequent polling-based refresh for this use case.
For merchants whose inventory changes on a daily or multi-day cycle rather than minute-to-minute, scheduled refresh is fully adequate for keeping feed content current.
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Feed Scheduling and Channel-Side Fetch Intervals
An important operational nuance in feed scheduling is the distinction between FeedBridge's refresh interval (how often FeedBridge regenerates the feed content at the hosted URL) and the channel's fetch interval (how often the AI platform or marketplace polls the hosted URL to retrieve updated content).
These two intervals are independently configured and operate asynchronously:
| Interval | Who Controls It | What It Governs | |---|---|---| | FeedBridge refresh interval | Merchant (in FeedBridge settings) | How often the feed file content at the hosted URL is updated | | Channel fetch interval | AI platform / marketplace | How often the channel downloads the latest content from the hosted URL |
The practical implication: even if FeedBridge refreshes the feed every hour, a channel that fetches the feed daily will only see updates once per day. The feed is current at the URL, but the channel has not yet fetched the updated content. Conversely, a channel that fetches the URL hourly will receive stale content if FeedBridge's refresh interval is set to daily.
For optimal feed freshness at the channel level, the FeedBridge refresh interval should be equal to or shorter than the channel's fetch interval — so that when the channel polls the URL, it always finds content that reflects at most one refresh cycle of divergence from the live catalog. Each channel's default fetch interval differs; Google Merchant Center, Meta Commerce Manager, and other platforms document their own feed fetch cadences in their respective product feed specifications.
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Feed Scheduling Across All Five Formats
FeedBridge's feed scheduling applies to all five hosted feed format outputs simultaneously. A single refresh cycle regenerates the ACP JSON-LD, GMC CSV, Meta CSV, and Amazon TSV files from the same current catalog state. This means:
- A price update applied to a product in FeedBridge propagates to all five channel feeds at the next refresh — not just the specific feed the merchant is actively managing.
- An enrichment improvement (a new intent tag, an updated Q&A pair, a revised description) appears in the ACP JSON-LD feed and UCP endpoint responses at the next refresh, without requiring a separate action per format.
- A product published or unpublished in FeedBridge is reflected across all hosted feed outputs simultaneously.
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Implementation Checklist
For merchants configuring feed scheduling in FeedBridge:
- [ ] Connect the store integration — set up Shopify Sync or WooCommerce Sync if the catalog source is a connected store, to ensure the FeedBridge catalog receives catalog changes from the store automatically
- [ ] Assess catalog change frequency — determine how frequently prices, availability, and product composition change in the live catalog to inform the refresh interval setting
- [ ] Configure the refresh interval — set the FeedBridge feed scheduling interval to match or exceed the catalog change frequency, erring toward more frequent refresh for high-velocity catalogs
- [ ] Register hosted feed URLs with channels — complete one-time feed URL registration in each channel (Google Merchant Center, Meta Commerce Manager, ChatGPT Shopping) using the FeedBridge-hosted URL for that format
- [ ] Check channel fetch intervals — verify the default fetch cadence for each registered channel to ensure the FeedBridge refresh interval is aligned
- [ ] Configure feed alert preferences — set email notification preferences for stale feed detection, dead URL alerts, and validity warnings so issues are flagged without requiring manual monitoring
- [ ] Note the real-time sync gap — if the catalog includes high-velocity inventory, plan for the current scheduled-refresh-only limitation until webhook-based real-time sync becomes available on the roadmap
Why It Matters for Merchants
Feed scheduling is the operational layer that determines whether a merchant's AI shopping presence reflects their actual catalog at any given moment. An enriched, well-structured feed that is refreshed infrequently becomes an unreliable data source — AI agents surface products with outdated prices, incorrect availability, and missing new items. The investment in AI enrichment, trust signals, and structured variants only delivers value when the feed containing those signals is current.
For merchants distributing across multiple channels simultaneously, feed scheduling is the mechanism that keeps all channels in sync from a single source of truth — the FeedBridge catalog. Without scheduled refresh, multi-channel consistency requires manual, per-channel file upload operations that are operationally error-prone and time-consuming at catalog scale. With scheduled refresh, catalog updates propagate automatically to all channels without manual intervention.
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FeedBridge Relevance
FeedBridge supports feed scheduling and configurable auto-refresh intervals as a live feature, applied across all five hosted feed format outputs. Shopify Sync and WooCommerce Sync provide store-level catalog synchronisation that feeds into the scheduled refresh pipeline. The webhook system supports event-based notifications for connected systems. Feed health monitoring validates each refresh cycle, and feed alert preferences notify merchants of detected issues.
Real-time webhook-based inventory sync — enabling push-based price and availability updates — is a high-priority roadmap gap, not yet live as of April 2026. The current recommended approach for high-velocity inventory merchants is to configure the most frequent available scheduled refresh interval.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How do I set the refresh interval in FeedBridge? A: Feed scheduling is configured in FeedBridge's feed management settings, where the auto-refresh interval can be set to match the merchant's catalog change frequency. The specific interval options available are configured within the FeedBridge platform's feed scheduling interface.
Q: Does a feed refresh also re-run AI enrichment on my products? A: A feed refresh regenerates the feed files from the current state of the FeedBridge catalog — including all enrichment fields that have already been applied. It does not automatically trigger new AI enrichment runs on unenriched products. AI enrichment (intent tags, Q&A pairs, personas, use cases) is applied via FeedBridge's enrichment pipeline separately from the feed scheduling cycle. Once enrichment is applied to a product, those fields are included in all subsequent feed refreshes until they are updated.
Q: If I add a new product to my catalog, will it appear in the feed automatically? A: Yes — if the new product is added to FeedBridge's catalog (either directly or via store sync), it will be included in the next scheduled feed refresh. The product will appear in all five hosted feed format outputs at that refresh, provided it passes field validation requirements for each format.
Q: Why is real-time sync listed as a gap if feed scheduling already keeps the feed current? A: Scheduled refresh has an inherent latency equal to the refresh interval — the feed reflects the catalog state as of the last refresh, not the current moment. For most catalog types this latency is acceptable. For high-velocity inventory scenarios (flash sales, live event tickets, rapidly selling limited stock), even a short refresh interval may be too slow to prevent the feed from showing incorrect availability. Real-time webhook-based sync would eliminate this latency entirely by pushing changes to the feed immediately when they occur — which is why it is a high-priority roadmap item.
Q: Does feed scheduling work the same way for all five feed formats? A: Yes. A single refresh cycle regenerates all five feed format outputs simultaneously from the current catalog state. The refresh interval applies to all formats together — there is one scheduled refresh pipeline, not five separate ones. All five hosted feed URLs are updated at each refresh cycle.
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Related Topics
Parent hub: Product Feeds and Commerce Data — Feed Delivery
Related concepts:
- Hosted Product Feed URLs: Why They Matter
- Feed Health Monitoring Basics
- Product Validation Checks in FeedBridge
- Actionable Fix Suggestions for AI Readiness
- Product Attributes That Improve Discoverability
Breadcrumb:
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Source Documentation
| Claim | Source | Source Class | Reference | |---|---|---|---| | Feed Scheduling: configurable auto-refresh intervals — live feature | FeedBridge Platform Capabilities April 2026 v2.0 | T1 – FeedBridge Internal | FeedBridge-Platform-Capabilities-April2026.md | | Hosted Feed URLs: CDN-backed, unique per brand — live | FeedBridge Platform Capabilities April 2026 v2.0 | T1 – FeedBridge Internal | FeedBridge-Platform-Capabilities-April2026.md | | Shopify Sync: store connection and product sync — live | FeedBridge Platform Capabilities April 2026 v2.0 | T1 – FeedBridge Internal | FeedBridge-Platform-Capabilities-April2026.md | | WooCommerce Sync: API-based catalog import — live | FeedBridge Platform Capabilities April 2026 v2.0 | T1 – FeedBridge Internal | FeedBridge-Platform-Capabilities-April2026.md | | Webhook System: configurable event webhooks — live | FeedBridge Platform Capabilities April 2026 v2.0 | T1 – FeedBridge Internal | FeedBridge-Platform-Capabilities-April2026.md | | Feed Health Monitoring: dead URL checks, validity tracking — live | FeedBridge Platform Capabilities April 2026 v2.0 | T1 – FeedBridge Internal | FeedBridge-Platform-Capabilities-April2026.md | | Feed Alert Preferences: email alerts for stale feeds, dead URLs — live | FeedBridge Platform Capabilities April 2026 v2.0 | T1 – FeedBridge Internal | FeedBridge-Platform-Capabilities-April2026.md | | Real-time inventory sync: high-priority roadmap gap, not yet live | FeedBridge Platform Capabilities April 2026 v2.0 | T1 – FeedBridge Internal | FeedBridge-Platform-Capabilities-April2026.md |