I recently purchased Product Feed ELITE for WooCommerce by AdTribes io to help me set up my google shopping feed. Don’t bother with this plugin as in my opinion it is totally useless. Product Feed PRO/ELITE for WooCommerce is a testament to the fact that just because a plugin has a lot of downloads on the WordPress repository does not mean it is any good.
So, here are my reasons why I think you should look elsewhere if you are thinking of buying this plugin.
1. Processing feeds often gets stuck and is painfully slow…
Processing feeds simply does not work properly and is extremely slow with this plugin. I have to keep on creating new feeds as each time I make changes and manually refresh a feed it will get stuck and break the feed. It is also a complete resource hog and will slow down your entire website to an unusable state for your customers when it is processing feeds… and often this processing is all for nothing anyway as it just gets stuck before it has finished processing anyway.
2. Adding your GTIN’s to your products is not an easy task at all
The main reason why I bought the elite version is because I needed to add GTIN’S to all of my products. One of the features of the Elite version si that it allows you to add your own GTIN’S to products and their variations. However, Product Feed ELITE for WooCommerce does not make this an easy task at all. There is no mass import feature so you must manually add your products barcode number into every single product one by one which is a an extremely tedious task is you have hundreds of products and variations. Plus this means you are forced to be relaitn on using the plugin. Product Feed ELITE for WooCommerce stores your GTIN’S as its own attribute it meaning you are tied into using the plugin forever unless you input every single GTIN barcode number again from scratch.
3. Causes products to be disapproved by Google
Now after adding all your GTINS numbers you must then make sure that <g:identifier_exists> is set to “YES” for products with numbers attached to them. In the field mapping settings Product Feed ELITE for WooCommerce is meant to calculate if a GTIN set or not and then change the <g:identifier_exists> accordingly. BUT here is the rub Product Feed ELITE for WooCommerce calculator is BROKEN and will not set identifier_exists to “YES” even if you have set up your field mapping and gtins correctly.
This means the hours that I spent adding in GTINS numbers has been totally pointless because the plugin DOES not do what it is meant to. By setting the product field identifier_exists to “NO” even though there is a GTIN in the product feed for that product will create a Google error and cause your products to be disapproved as a result.
The crappy slowness of the plugin not being able to process product feeds correctly is something I can sort of annoyingly learn to live with.. but the fact that something that is so important such as setting the identifier_exists correctly does not work and causes google to disapprove your products is unacceptable.
I do not recommend anyone use either the free version or the elite version of this plugin. It will just give you a lot of stress and Google will just disapprove your products over and over again until you move to something that actually works properly.
