Bazaarvoice Integration

A Bazaarvoice product feed isn't about visibility or spend the way an ads feed is — it's about correctness. Bazaarvoice's own description of the catalog's purpose is direct: the product catalog feed is sent to Bazaarvoice "to match each product with its consumer-generated content." If a product in your feed is missing, misnamed, or filed under the wrong category, Bazaarvoice has nothing reliable to match incoming reviews against, which shows up as reviews failing to appear, reviews attaching to the wrong item, or the review-submission form on your site not knowing which product a shopper is even reviewing.

Bazaarvoice's own engineering team frames it in terms of downstream reliability: a clear, accurate, consistent product name "enables our APIs to retrieve and display product information correctly, ensuring that your reviews and ratings are always associated with the right item." Category data plays a similar role for new review submissions, since it "facilitates seamless content submission by guiding user contributions to the correct product groupings." Feedance keeps that catalog data current automatically as your store's products, names and categories change, instead of leaving Bazaarvoice working from a stale one-time export.

Bazaarvoice ties every review to a product using the identifiers you send in the feed — primarily ExternalId and ProductPageUrl — cross-referenced against the product ID your site passes when it loads the review display widget on a product page. When those two don't agree, the practical result documented by Bazaarvoice is that "the wrong UGC gets returned": either no reviews show up, or reviews for a different product do.

For product variants — the same item in different colors or sizes, for example — Bazaarvoice's feed schema supports a Product Families mechanic using two custom attributes: BV_FE_FAMILY groups related SKUs under a shared family value (in Bazaarvoice's own example feed, products tagged Round and Green), and BV_FE_EXPAND tells Bazaarvoice to pull in reviews from every other product in that family (BV_FE_FAMILY:Round) so a shopper sees aggregated ratings rather than a handful of reviews scattered thinly across near-identical variant listings.

Bazaarvoice's documented Product Feed is XML, structured as a single <Feed> root element carrying three child sections in order: <Brands>, <Categories> and <Products>. Bazaarvoice's own official example feed uses the namespace http://www.bazaarvoice.com/xs/PRR/ProductFeed/14.7 on the root element, alongside a name attribute identifying the client, an incremental attribute (true/false), and an extractDate timestamp.

Only full-catalog uploads are supported by default — there's a documented cap of 750,000 products per full feed — so unless you've had a delta/incremental process built specifically for your account, every submission should represent your entire current catalog, not just what changed. Feeds are typically packaged and delivered via FTP/SFTP to the location provisioned for your Bazaarvoice account rather than pulled from a URL you host. Note that Bazaarvoice's newer Social Commerce API catalog ingestion (used by some accounts, particularly post the Bazaarvoice–PowerReviews product line merge) instead accepts CSV, TSV, XML, RSS or ATOM with a different, Google-Shopping-style field set — which path applies to your account depends on your Bazaarvoice setup, so Feedance builds to the classic XML Product Feed structure described here since that's the format Bazaarvoice's own documentation names "Product Feed."

The table below uses Bazaarvoice's own field names exactly as they appear in Bazaarvoice's official example Product Feed XML. Bazaarvoice's engineering documentation explicitly names ExternalId, Name and category identification (CategoryExternalId, plus a matching Name entry in the Categories section) as essential; the remaining fields are documented parts of the same schema, marked Recommended where I could not confirm a hard mandatory designation.

1. Add your catalog to Feedance. Connect your store or upload your product data in the Feedance Dashboard.
2. Map your fields to Bazaarvoice's Product Feed tags. Feedance maps your product ID to ExternalId, title to Name, canonical product URL to ProductPageUrl, main image to ImageUrl, and category and brand to CategoryExternalId / BrandExternalId — with matching Category and Brand entries generated in the feed's Categories and Brands sections so those references resolve.
3. Identifiers get sanitized automatically. Feedance strips spaces, plus signs and other characters Bazaarvoice's own documentation warns against in ExternalId and CategoryExternalId, replacing them with hyphens or underscores, since malformed identifiers are a documented cause of encoding problems.
4. Variants get grouped for review aggregation. If your catalog has color/size variants of the same underlying product, Feedance can populate BV_FE_FAMILY and BV_FE_EXPAND so Bazaarvoice aggregates reviews across the family instead of splitting them thinly across each SKU.
5. Deliver the feed. Feedance packages the result as XML matching Bazaarvoice's Feed/Brands/Categories/Products structure and delivers it to the SFTP location your Bazaarvoice account is configured to receive — confirm the first delivery lands cleanly, since a failed import is logged and triggers an email alert rather than a visible in-app error.

Because only full-catalog uploads are supported by default, every feed submission should represent your entire current product set, not a delta — Bazaarvoice has no standard mechanism to accept "just what changed" unless a custom incremental process has been built for your account. Reported cadences vary by integration: some setups run the export nightly, others submit daily, and Bazaarvoice's newer Social Commerce catalog ingestion path is documented as refreshing on a roughly six-hour cycle by default — so there isn't one universal number to target, only a shared principle. New products need to be in a submitted feed before reviews can attach to them, so the safest practice is sending an updated feed on a fixed daily or nightly schedule and always ahead of a product going live on your site, rather than reacting to catalog changes after the fact. If your catalog is at or approaching the documented 750,000-product cap for full feeds, plan a delta/incremental feed process in advance rather than discovering the limit when a submission is rejected.

Match your feed's identifiers to your page code exactly. The single most common cause of reviews not appearing, or appearing on the wrong item, is ExternalId or product URL disagreeing between the feed and the review widget on your site.

Follow Bazaarvoice's ID naming rule. Use only hyphens and underscores in ExternalId and CategoryExternalId — Bazaarvoice's own engineering guidance calls out spaces, plus signs and other HTML characters as a documented cause of encoding problems.

Group variants with Product Families. Use BV_FE_FAMILY and BV_FE_EXPAND so color/size variants of the same product share and aggregate reviews instead of fragmenting a handful of reviews across many near-duplicate listings.

Send secondary identifiers when you have them. UPC, EAN and ManufacturerPartNumber are optional but give Bazaarvoice additional signals to match your catalog correctly, particularly useful during initial onboarding or catalog migrations.

Submit before launch, not after. Because only full-catalog feeds are supported by default, a new product can't collect or display reviews until it's already present in a submitted feed.

Keep category names and IDs consistent over time. Since category data routes new review submissions to the correct product grouping, renaming or reshuffling category IDs without updating the feed can misroute incoming reviews.

What format does Bazaarvoice's Product Feed use?
XML — a <Feed> root element containing Brands, Categories and Products sections, delivered via FTP/SFTP to your Bazaarvoice account.

Is this the same as an ads or comparison-shopping feed?
No. Bazaarvoice's Product Feed exists to match your catalog to collected reviews and ratings for display and syndication — it isn't used for ad placement or price comparison the way a Google Merchant Center or comparison-shopping feed is.

How many products can I include?
Full-catalog feeds are documented as supporting up to 750,000 products by default.

Can I send only what changed instead of my full catalog?
Not by default — only full-catalog uploads are supported unless a custom incremental/delta process has been set up for your account.

What happens if my feed fails to import?
Bazaarvoice logs the failure and sends an email alert; it does not automatically retry the import, so a corrected file needs to be resubmitted.

How do I keep reviews together across color or size variants?
Use the BV_FE_FAMILY attribute to group variant SKUs and BV_FE_EXPAND to pull in reviews from the rest of the family.

Why are reviews showing up on the wrong product?
Almost always an ExternalId or product URL mismatch between what's in the feed and what your page code passes to the review display widget.