Ciao Integration

Because a feed submitted to Kelkoo Group's shared merchant system is not limited to one storefront. Ciao, Kelkoo and LeGuide are run as sibling brands under the same corporate umbrella, drawing on the same merchant network and product-data pipeline. In practice, this means a single properly formatted feed can surface across multiple branded comparison sites in several European markets (Ciao's own footprint historically spanned the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden) rather than requiring a separate one-off integration purely for Ciao.

That said, prospective advertisers should go in with realistic expectations: Ciao today is a modest, legacy-traffic comparison listing channel riding on Kelkoo Group's infrastructure -- not the high-traffic, review-driven discovery engine it was under Microsoft ownership. Treat it as a low-effort, ride-along channel rather than a primary growth channel.

Third-party integration tooling that lists Ciao as a channel (for example, the Oxatis/Actinic "Ciao" storefront app) describes a two-tier model: a free basic listing that gets a merchant's catalog indexed in Ciao's directory, and a paid "priority listing" tier billed on a pay-per-click basis at a flat, published-rate-card price per click with no signup fee. Paid listings were also described as being distributed onward to partner comparison sites. Separately, feed-tool vendors describe connecting a store to Ciao as also feeding into Kelkoo Group's own KelkooAds distribution and, from there, onward to channels like Google Shopping Ads.

Flag this honestly: this pricing description comes from third-party integrator marketing pages rather than a current, dated Ciao or Kelkoo Group rate card, so treat the CPC mechanic as directionally accurate but confirm current rates directly with Kelkoo Group before budgeting against it.

No standalone, Ciao-branded feed specification was found. What does exist is Kelkoo Group's shared advertiser product-data-feed documentation, which is the system that powers "KelkooGroup shopping campaigns" across its brand sites -- Ciao being one of them. That documentation specifies:

1. Feed files as plain TXT or XML, hosted at a URL that Kelkoo Group's crawler can fetch directly.
2. For text feeds, a header row whose attribute names must exactly match Kelkoo Group's published product-data attribute names, with a consistent field separator.
3. For XML feeds, tag names that match the same attribute list, with free-text fields wrapped in CDATA.

Because Ciao does not appear to publish its own separate spec today, the safe working assumption -- and the one this page uses -- is that a feed built to Kelkoo Group's product-data spec is what reaches Ciao's listings, rather than there being Ciao-specific field names to hunt down separately.

These attribute names come from Kelkoo Group's shared merchant/product-data feed documentation (the system Ciao listings are inferred to run on), not from a Ciao-only spec page. Kelkoo Group's own guidance confirms some attributes are mandatory across all products, while others are required only for specific product types (its documentation calls out apparel as one example needing extra fields):

Kelkoo Group's documentation is explicit that leaving a required attribute blank or malformed can cause the affected products to be excluded from campaigns entirely, so treat the mandatory five (id, title, product-url, price, brand) as non-negotiable.

Since Ciao's listings run on Kelkoo Group's shared feed infrastructure rather than a Ciao-only portal, Feedance treats this as a Kelkoo Group-schema connection:

1. Map your product catalog fields in Feedance to the Kelkoo Group attribute set above, prioritizing the five mandatory fields first.
2. Let Feedance validate the mapped feed against that schema and flag any missing or malformed mandatory attributes before publishing.
3. Generate the feed as a TXT or XML file hosted at a stable Feedance-managed URL that Kelkoo Group's crawler can reach on its own fetch schedule.
4. Submit that feed URL through Kelkoo Group's merchant/advertiser onboarding process, specifying Ciao (and any sibling Kelkoo Group brand sites you want) as a target destination.
5. Use Feedance's monitoring to watch for products silently dropping out of the feed -- the most common symptom of a missing mandatory attribute on this network.

Kelkoo Group's documentation states that feeds are fetched on a country-specific schedule, generally three to four times per day -- its own published example for Austria lists fetch times of 00:00, 08:00, 12:00 and 15:00 CET -- and explicitly warns that these timings are "subject to change without prior notice." Since no Ciao-specific schedule is separately published, plan around that same cadence: refresh your feed at least once daily, and ideally in step with a multi-times-per-day rhythm, so price and stock-availability changes don't sit stale between crawler fetches.

No Ciao-specific error codes or error-message text were found in public documentation, so nothing here should be read as a literal error string you'll see in a dashboard. What Kelkoo Group's own guidance does confirm is the underlying failure pattern: if a required attribute is missing or incorrectly formatted, the affected product simply does not show up in listings/campaigns rather than throwing a visible error. In practice, that means the most common issues to check for are:

1. One of the five mandatory fields (id, title, product-url, price, brand) is blank, malformed, or inconsistent between the header row and the data rows.
2. Category-specific required attributes (Kelkoo Group calls out apparel as one example) are missing for products in categories that need them.
3. The feed URL itself becomes unreachable or stops updating, so the crawler keeps re-fetching stale price/availability data.

General, sourcing-independent practices worth applying on any comparison-shopping network, including this one:

1. Keep ean/GTIN and mpn populated wherever you have them -- these identifiers are what let comparison engines match your offer against the correct product listing.
2. Fill in delivery-cost and delivery-time even when optional; comparison shoppers filter on total landed cost, not just sticker price.
3. Refresh price and availability at least as often as the destination's crawler fetches your feed, so listings never show a price or stock level that's already gone stale.
4. Use specific, consistent merchant-category values rather than generic catch-all categories, since mismapped categories are a common cause of category-specific required fields being silently missing.
5. Given the CPC-style pricing reported for priority placement, start with the free listing tier to validate feed quality before committing budget to paid placement.

Is Ciao still active today? Partly. The open, pay-for-reviews consumer community that made Ciao well known shut down in 2017-2018. But the ciao.de and ciao.co.uk domains still resolve as live pages today and remain listed by Kelkoo Group as one of its shopping-comparison brands, so it still functions as a merchant listing channel.

Is today's Ciao the same business as the Microsoft-owned Ciao from 2008? No. Microsoft owned Ciao's parent company only from 2008; ownership passed to LeGuide Group in 2012 and then to Kelkoo Group in 2016, which still operates it today.

Can shoppers still write or read consumer reviews on Ciao? The paid review/rewards program that defined Ciao ended in December 2017. Today's site functions as a merchant price-listing surface within Kelkoo Group's network rather than an active open review community.

Does Ciao have its own separate feed specification? None was found publicly. Feeds appear to run on Kelkoo Group's shared product-data feed system, which is the same schema this page documents.

Which markets does Ciao cover? Historically Ciao operated sites for the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden; current live coverage should be confirmed with Kelkoo Group directly, since not every historical market necessarily still has an active Ciao storefront today.