Tutorials Shops
Tutorial · online shops
Turn a product feed into price-drop posts.
Six steps, about ten minutes of real work. At the end a price drop in your feed becomes a branded, approved post — and you are the one who says yes to it.
▶ Listen to this tutorial
Narrated, about two minutes.Prefer to read? The same words are written out below, step by step. Each step also has a Read aloud button that uses your browser's own voice.
What you will have at the end
A shop feed polled on a schedule, a price-drop automation capped at three posts a day, and a queue you clear in a minute over coffee.
The steps
Do them in order. Nothing publishes until you approve a post, so there is no step here that can surprise you.
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Connect your product feed
Open Feeds and paste the address of the feed you already give Google — a Merchant XML, a plain XML, a CSV or a JSON endpoint. MagpieFeed fetches it live, tells you the detected type and the item count, and shows the field mapping it inferred: title, price, sale price, currency, image, product URL, availability. Correct anything it guessed wrong, then save. Items are keyed by the feed's own product id, so tracking parameters on your links never create a duplicate product.
Tip. If the feed needs a login, use the private-feed fields rather than putting credentials in the URL — the password is encrypted at rest and never echoed back to the browser.
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Connect a channel — or stay in Studio Mode
Channels is where publishing is decided. MagpieFeed can publish to a Facebook Page, an Instagram Business account, X, Telegram and Discord; connect one and the health pill on the card shows whether the token is valid and when it expires. Connect nothing and you are in Studio Mode: every post is still rendered and captioned, and you share it by hand from the queue. Studio Mode is a perfectly good place to run for a week while you decide.
Tip. Instagram needs a Business or Creator account linked to a Facebook Page — a personal profile cannot be published to by any tool, ours included.
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Pick a template
Templates renders each preset with your own product number one and your own two colours, so you choose with your eyes rather than from a description. For a shop, pick one of the price-pair layouts: it draws the old price struck through beside the new one and a discount badge. Set your brand palette, typeface, tone of voice and your affiliate disclosure line here — the disclosure is rendered onto the card and appended to the caption on every post.
Tip. The caption validator will not let a number into the text that is not in your feed data. If a discount percentage looks wrong on the preview, the feed is wrong, not the renderer.
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Build the automation
Automations reads as one sentence you fill in. Choose the trigger a price drops and set the threshold — fifteen percent is a sensible first setting, and the field accepts nought to ninety. Pick your template. Choose how the day's slots are made: drip posts at the times you list, spread distributes posts across a window, asap posts as soon as the event happens. Then set the rate limit: at most three a day and one an hour to start with, up to a hundred a day and twelve an hour. Finally, hold each item for fourteen days before it may appear again, and leave the freshness window on never drop an item event for being old — a deal that waited a day is still a deal.
Tip. Add a second automation with the an item comes back in stock trigger and a lower cap. Restocks are rarer than price drops and deserve their own rule rather than fighting for the same three slots.
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Work the queue
Approval mode starts on I approve each post, deliberately. The first run fills Queue with rendered cards, each with its image, its caption, its scheduled time and the item it came from. Read the caption, edit it in place if you want, then approve or skip. Open a post to see the delivery log — every publishing attempt with its endpoint, HTTP status and the platform's own error message, so "why didn't it go out" is never a mystery.
Tip. Skipping is not deleting. A skipped item stays inside its dedupe window, so it will not come straight back tomorrow.
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Go live
Once a week of queues has gone out the way you would have sent them, switch the automation's approval mode to Publish on schedule and it runs without you. Everything else stays: the rate limit, the dedupe window, the quiet hours. Pause any rule from its switch on the Automations list, and the posts it already made stay in the queue.
Tip. Leave one automation on review even after you go automatic. It is the cheapest possible alarm for a feed that has started emitting nonsense.
The other walkthroughs
The same six steps, tuned for a different kind of feed.
Blogs
Six steps. At the end, every article you publish comes back as a branded card, and a second rule quietly recirculates the archive so a slow writing week is not a silent timeline.
News
Six steps, tuned for volume. The settings that matter here are the ones the other two tutorials leave alone: spread mode, a high rate limit, newest-first ordering and a freshness window that drops what missed its moment.