Our Ingestion Process
When you send us your data, it does not show up on Prisjakt instantly. It passes through a few steps first, and each step takes a different amount of time. This page explains those steps in plain language, so you know what to expect and where to look if something does not show up the way you expected.
The article has three parts:
- Products and offers. Two words we use all the time, and what they mean.
- How your data reaches us and what happens next. Why some updates take minutes and others have to wait for a product to be added.
- How to check the result on Prisjakt. Why your offer may look different from what you expected, or seem to be missing.
Products and Offers
Everything on Prisjakt is built from two things: products and offers. They are easy to mix up, but the difference matters a lot for the rest of this article.
A product describes what something is
A product is the item itself: its name, brand, images, codes (like EAN/GTIN), and specifications. A product has no price. It is the same product no matter who sells it.
An offer describes who sells it, for how much
An offer is one shop saying "we sell this product, at this price, and this is our stock status". The same product usually has many offers, one from each shop that sells it.
The product is the item on the shelf. The offer is the price tag a particular shop puts on it. Many shops can put their own price tag on the same item.
Example
| Product | Offer | |
|---|---|---|
| Answers the question | What is it? | Who sells it, and on what terms? |
| Contains | Name, brand, codes, images, specs | Price, stock status, shipping, link |
| Has a price? | ❌ No | ✅ Yes |
| How many are there? | One per real-world item | One per shop selling that item |
| Who provides it? | Brands, manufacturers, and shops | Shops |
Your offer can only appear on Prisjakt once it is attached to a product. If there is no suitable product yet, your offer waits until the product has been added, as you will see below.
How Your Data Reaches Us
Your data goes through two stages before it shows up on Prisjakt:
- Delivery. Your offer gets to us, either in a feed or as a real-time update.
- Processing. We work out which product your offer belongs to, and attach it.
The total time you see is delivery time + processing time.
Stage 1: Delivery
There are two ways to send us offers, and their timing is very different.
- 📄 Scheduled feeds
- ⚡ Real-time updates
A feed is a file (for example XML or CSV) that you publish on a web address. We fetch it on a fixed schedule. How often depends on your subscription. Each ◆ in the chart below is one read. The more often we read your feed, the sooner we see your changes. Reading once an hour is the fastest option.
The schedule is about when we read your feed, not when you change your prices. If your e-commerce platform or feed service updates the file after we have read it, we will not see the change until the next time we fetch it.
Example: your feed is read once an hour, on the hour. You change a price at 09:55, just before our 10:00 read, but your platform does not regenerate the feed file until 10:20. We read the old price at 10:00 and only get the new price at 11:00.
In this example, it took about an hour before we even received the new price, even though you changed it before our 10:00 fetch. Many platforms and feed services only rebuild the feed file every few hours, so check how often your feed file is regenerated as well.
When we read your feed we also check the data. If an offer has errors, for example a missing price or an invalid link, it may be rejected and will not be updated at all until the error is fixed. See Validation Severity Levels and Required vs Optional Fields.
With real-time updates, your system sends each change to us the moment it happens, instead of waiting for us to fetch a file. This is usually done with a plugin or integration in your e-commerce platform. See Real-time HTTP Updates.
- Normally: the change reaches us within a minute.
- Rarely: during unusually high load, updates can be queued and delayed for up to a few hours. This is not normal operation, and the queue catches up by itself.
Real-time updates are checked the same way as feeds. An update with invalid data is rejected, and your previous information stays in place until you send a valid update.
Stage 2: Processing
Once a valid offer has reached us, we have to work out which product it belongs to. Your offer takes one of three paths, depending on what we already know about it:
🟢 Path 1: An offer we already know. Minutes.
The offer is already attached to a product, so all we do is update the details, like the new price or stock status. The update itself is quick, but our systems and website keep several layers of caches (temporarily stored copies) to stay fast, so it usually takes a few minutes before the change is visible everywhere. If nothing about the offer has changed since last time, there is nothing to update and we skip it.
Example: you lower the price of a TV you have listed with us for months. The new price shows up on Prisjakt within minutes of us receiving it.
🟡 Path 2: A new offer for a product we already have. Usually minutes.
This is an offer we have not seen before. We look for the right product to attach it to by comparing several things, such as EAN/GTIN and MPN codes, the title, brand, and images.
This usually takes a few minutes, but can take longer depending on:
- The quality of your data. Offers with correct EAN/GTIN codes are matched much faster and more reliably than offers that only have a title.
- The market. Some countries have far more products to compare against than others.
- How busy the system is at the time.
Example: you start selling a popular phone that other shops already sell. Your offer is matched to the existing phone product within minutes.
🔴 Path 3: A product that does not exist on Prisjakt yet. Waits in a queue.
If we cannot find a matching product, your offer waits and is not shown on Prisjakt yet. A new product has to be added first, and there are three ways that happens:
- 🗂️ Product queue (automatic)
- 🙋 Request a product (shops)
- 🏭 Manufacturer feed (brands)
Offers without a matching product are placed in a queue, and we create products from them over time. This happens automatically, without you having to do anything.
The queue is not first come, first served. The order is decided by a priority that combines several factors, for example the brand, the category, and the shop. This means:
- Some offers get a product quickly, while others can wait a long time.
- It is not possible to say exactly when a specific offer will get its product.
If you need a particular product sooner, request it, or ask the brand to send a manufacturer feed (see the other tabs).
In the product matching tool in Business Center, you can ask us to create a product for one of your offers.
- Each request is handled by hand by our content team. People check the codes, images, specifications, and category.
- Requests are made one product at a time.
- How long it takes depends on the product and on how many requests the team has at the moment.
This works well for a few products, but not for adding a large range.
Manufacturers and brands can send us a manufacturer feed with information about all their products. This is the fastest way to add many products at once.
- First time: a one-off check. Before we use a new manufacturer feed, we check it carefully to make sure the information can be trusted. This first check is slow.
- After that: approved. Once the feed has passed the check, it is approved (whitelisted) as a trusted source. New products in the feed are then added much faster, without a manual request for each one.
When a new product is added, we automatically look for waiting offers that belong to it. You don't need to send your offer again.
- Offers with a GTIN/EAN code that matches the new product are attached directly.
- Offers without a matching code are found through text similarity (comparing titles and other information). This happens eventually, but takes longer.
Example: you are the first shop to sell a newly launched product that nobody else lists. Your offer waits in the queue. When the product is added, either from the queue, from your request in Business Center, or from the brand's manufacturer feed, your offer is matched to it automatically and appears on Prisjakt. This is faster if your offer has the correct GTIN/EAN code.
Ask the brand or manufacturer whether they send a manufacturer feed to Prisjakt. If they don't, point them to our manufacturer documentation. One approved manufacturer feed adds their whole range, which is much faster than waiting for the queue or requesting products one by one.
- ✅ Always include correct GTIN/EAN, MPN, and brand.
- ✅ Use clear, descriptive titles, for example "Sony WH-1000XM5 Wireless Headphones Black", not just "Headphones".
- ✅ Provide good images and as many specifications as you can.
- ✅ Keep the ID of each offer the same over time. If the ID changes, we treat it as a brand new offer and it has to be matched again.
Summary: How long does it take?
| Situation | Delivery (feed) | Delivery (real-time) | Processing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price or stock change on an existing offer | Up to your feed interval | Within a minute | 🟢 Minutes |
| New offer, product already exists on Prisjakt | Up to your feed interval | Within a minute | 🟡 Usually minutes |
| New offer, product does not exist on Prisjakt | Up to your feed interval | Within a minute | 🔴 Waits in a queue until the product is added, then matched automatically |
| Offer with errors in the data | ⛔ Blocked until fixed | ⛔ Blocked until fixed | – |
Because of caching, it can take up to around 15 minutes after processing before a change appears on every page of the website. This is why even a simple price update takes minutes rather than seconds.
Checking the Result on Prisjakt
When you look up your products on Prisjakt, your offer may not look the way you expected, or it may seem to be missing. Usually this is not an error. It is down to one of the two things below.
Offers look different depending on your subscription
Offers are shown differently depending on whether the shop has a paid subscription:
| Shop type | How the offer is shown |
|---|---|
| Paying (featured) shop | Shown directly in the price list, with a clickable link that sends visitors to your shop. |
| Non-paying shop | Collapsed into a group at first. Once expanded, shown greyed out and not clickable. |
The screenshots below are from the Swedish site.
Featured offer: shown directly, with a link
A featured offer shows the shop's logo, price, and stock status, and a "Till butik" ("To shop") button that takes the visitor straight to your shop.
Unfeatured offers: collapsed at first
Offers from non-paying shops are not listed one by one at first. They are grouped together in a collapsed row labelled "Erbjudanden utan direktlänk" ("Offers without a direct link"). The row shows how many offers it contains ("Visa 12 st", "Show 12") and the lowest price among them.
Unfeatured offer: greyed out once expanded
The individual offers only appear after the visitor clicks "Visa" ("Show") to expand the group. They are greyed out and have no button to go to the shop.
If your offer is inside the collapsed group, or shows up greyed out, it has been ingested and matched correctly. It is only shown differently because of your subscription level. Contact our Merchant Acquisition Team if you want your offers to be shown directly and be clickable.
Out-of-stock offers are hidden by default
Offers that are not available, for example out of stock, are hidden by default in the price list. Visitors only see them if they change the filter to include them.
So if you cannot find your offer, check whether it is marked as out of stock. If it is, change the availability filter on the product page to show all offers.
🔍 Checklist: "I can't find my offer on Prisjakt"
Work through these questions in order:
- Has enough time passed? Check your feed's update frequency, and when your platform last regenerated the feed file.
- Is the offer valid? Look for errors or warnings for the offer in Business Center.
- Does the product exist on Prisjakt? If not, your offer waits in a queue until the product is added. To speed it up, request the product in the product matching tool in Business Center, or ask the brand to send a manufacturer feed. If the product has been added recently, give the automatic matching some time, especially if your offer has no GTIN/EAN code. See path 3.
- Is the offer out of stock? Change the availability filter on the product page to include unavailable offers.
- Is your shop on a non-paying subscription? Then your offer is inside the collapsed "Erbjudanden utan direktlänk" group. Expand it to find your offer, which is greyed out and not clickable. See above.
- Did the offer ID change? A new ID means a new offer, which has to be matched again from the start.
If none of these explain it, contact our support and include the offer ID and your shop name.