YML file: what you need to know about it

The fact that online sales of goods and services are already many times higher than the volumes of regular retail stores — This is not news to anyone. Today, the online trading market is represented by a huge number of companies working in different directions. Thus, along with the online stores that are already familiar to us, marketplaces, as well as Yandex product search.

And such opportunities should be taken advantage of by all those who want to give a new start to the development of their business, expand its boundaries and capabilities. Now let’s look in more detail at how to start trading through product search from Yandex.Market, namely by creating and downloading a YML file. Let's get acquainted with more detailed topics, why it is needed and what it is. We'll tell you how to create it, test it for errors and get it working. We will also pay attention to how to ensure the most convenient and functional work in the Yandex system and not only using mobile proxies.

Purpose of the YML file

YML — This is an abbreviation for Yandex Market Language, which literally translates as “Yandex.Market language”. This product was created based on XML technology, designed to simplify the transfer of data in Internet platforms and applications. At its core, the YML file will contain all the information about your products or services. One of its varieties can be called the CSV format, intended for direct uploading of public pages with goods to the marketplace catalog.

Using a YML file in practice, you can:

• easily and simply add products to the catalog;
• keep the information in product cards up to date;
• load price lists from third-party programs and services;
• create texts for advertising campaigns, etc.

It can also be used to monitor and control the operation of sites. In particular, the data collected in it can be used in the Webmaster application from Yandex, designed for analyzing Internet resources.

The fact is that Yandex. The market has fairly strict requirements for YML files. This applies not only to their format, but also to their content. Thus, both classic Excel and CSV formats are suitable for downloading products. But, if you still decide to create a YML file, you can automate the process of updating product items along with their characteristics.

It works something like this:

• you create a price list for your products, indicating in it the parameters that Yandex requires;
• the received data is processed by the system and based on it, cards are generated for each position in the category to which they belong;
• you get relevant, targeted sales clicks.

Yes, in the process of preparing a price list in YML format, you will have to spend a little more effort and time, but in the end you will get a truly professional-level solution that will greatly simplify your subsequent work with goods.

Let's get acquainted with the structure of the YML file

We have already said that the YML file will contain the most comprehensive and voluminous information about your products or services, or the store itself. Its structure is as follows:

1. Heading. This is a kind of header of a YML file, which indicates the XML version and the corresponding encoding, either UTF-8 or Windows-1251.
2. Shop. Inside this block will be placed all the information about the store itself, namely the company name, a link to the main page, the main categories of products, information about payment and delivery.
3. Offers. This is a block dedicated directly to the products themselves. This tag will be used for each item in your catalog. Based on the information received, Yandex will understand what kind of card it needs to generate. It is mandatory to indicate the price, the size of the discount, if any, the availability of the product in stock, and also a link to the photo.

When compiling a YML file, you yourself determine which elements you need to include in it and which you can discard. So, if you plan to provide your customers with gifts for purchases, then you can add the gifts element. If you are launching a promotion, then add promos. If we are talking about the 18+ product category, then we additionally fill in the adult element. You can find information about all possible elements for each block in the “Help” section. on Yandex.Market.

Particular attention should be paid to the Shop and Offers elements, because they will contain the most complete information about your products and services in the store and provided.

Shop element

Shop is a fairly voluminous element, which contains a lot of additional information, in particular:

• Name. This is the name of your online store that will be displayed on the website.
• Company. This is the full name of the company. This element is required to be filled in, although it will not be displayed to users. It is only necessary so that Yandex.Market can identify your brand.
• Currencies. This is a list of exchange rates that your store supports. If you work within one country and with one currency, then there is no point in specifying this element.
• Categories. This is a list of categories and subcategories of your products.
• Delivery-options. Here are the delivery conditions for certain regions of the country and its cost.

Additional elements that can be included in the Shop block also include the name of the service, which provides technical support for your store, the ability to pick up your order, etc.

Offers element

We have already mentioned above that each such element will contain one product offer. You can enter information here in a simplified or free version. In the first case, the Name element will contain all the information about the product type, model, manufacturer, but in the second it will be divided into separate elements.

The list of elements that you can add to this block is very diverse. But the most frequently asked questions are:

• Price/oldprice. this is the current price, the old price of the product, as well as the discount amount.
• CurrencyId. This is the currency in which goods can be paid for.
• Picture. Link to product photos. It will automatically be pulled up in Yandex.Market and directly in Yandex search.
• Store. Here you specify 2 parameters true and false. The first indicates that, if you wish, you can pick up the goods directly at the point of sale, and the second indicates that this cannot be done.
• Pickup. By analogy with the previous option, this means that true indicates that it is possible to pick up the goods at your own expense, and false indicates that this cannot be done.
• Delivery and delivery-options. This element indicates the availability of the product in the warehouse and the terms of its delivery.

Before moving on to filling out these categories, it would be a good idea to familiarize yourself with the Yandex recommendations. They provide fairly detailed information about what elements should be included in the YML file when filling it out.

Recommendations for filling

For your YML file to work as efficiently as possible, it must be created correctly. To do this, it is enough to have basic knowledge in the field of Internet layout. So, you have to follow the following syntax rules:

1. Complete match of opening and closing tags. Here attention is paid not only to the word itself, but also to the letter with which it is written.
2. It is necessary to strictly observe the order of the elements being written, namely the sequence of their attachments, opening and closing tags.
3. It is necessary to strictly observe the sequence of characters when writing comments. Here, there is an exclamation mark at the beginning of the tag.
4. If it is necessary to add special characters, such as ampersand, apostrophe, special service elements are used.

Now that you know why a YML file is needed and what elements it contains, you can proceed directly to creating it.

Methods and recommendations for creating a YML file

You can create a YML file in one of 3 ways:

1. Manually. A rather labor-intensive method that involves a programmer writing a script to upload product offers. It is used mainly by online stores and other trading platforms that offer consumers an average of 20-30 product items. The use of ready-made solutions presented in special libraries will help to significantly simplify this work.
2. Using CMS modules. Such modules are capable of exporting data directly from an online store to YML files. Moreover, a number of services allow you to generate such files directly in the administrative panel of the resource. If the solution you choose does not have such an option, you will need to use additional plugins or modules. CMS include such popular store management systems as InSales, 1C-Bitrix, MoySkladyu. This solution is perfect for sites with a large number of product items. But you need to understand that this module is capable of automating processes such as updating the catalog and information in each product card, changes in prices and the appearance of discounts, creating purchase orders and sending them, updating information about product balances, setting up payment and delivery parameters, receiving statistics. But still, you will need to enter some elements, in particular the minimum number of units for sale, the presence of an advance payment, and information about the delivery itself into its YML file yourself.
3. Using special software. Today on the market there are third-party products from developers created specifically for generating YML files. With their help, you can automatically generate files and convert the received information into a YML file, and set up regular price list updates. The basic package of such programs, which are provided free of charge, often includes the ability to index several hundred pages of product items.

Add products to Yandex search

Yandex Product Search displays product offers directly in search results. That is, now visitors do not necessarily have to go to the online store itself in order to purchase this or that product. They will be able to find and buy products directly from search.

To set up such a solution for your store, you need to use Webmaster and download a ready-made price list for product search. To do this you need to do the following:

1. Go to the “Products and Offers” section, and then— in "Data Sources". Here we find the “Download feed” button. and click on it.
2. Select the region in which your ads will be displayed, as well as the geography of delivery. If your assortment includes a huge number of products, then you can use several YML feeds at the same time. This will significantly speed up the processing of goods due to parallel work with files.
3. After you upload the feed to Webmaster, the system will give you a message about whether there are errors in this file or not. If it turns out that there are errors, click on the “View errors” button. to open a detailed report. We would like to draw your attention to the fact that Yandex pays attention not only to the technical indicators of the YML file, but also to the information contained in it. We have already discussed all these parameters above. But in order to avoid mistakes, you need to take the most responsible approach to filling it out.

To view all those products that were downloaded and accepted by the system, as well as positions in which errors were identified, go to the “Products and Offers” section, and then — in the “Summary” block.

Adding products to Yandex.Market can also be done in several ways: manually, through a YML file, through a module in the CMS, or through an Excel template. But still, if you want information about your products to be updated automatically, you still need to use YML files.

You can complete the upcoming task as follows:

1. Go to your store’s personal account, then go to the “Products” tab, and in it select the “Auto-update” option.
2. Click on the “Add link to file” button.
3. Now you need to decide whether your YML file will transmit information about certain products or only about the conditions for their placement in the store, namely the current price, balances, etc.
4. If several business models are used at the same time, then it is optimal to separate these files for each of the directions. The same solution will be convenient if you want to speed up the processing of your product offers.
5. After you select the feed option that suits you, you will need to add a link to the YML file. You can store it either on your own server or directly on the website. If additional password protection is provided, you will need to provide the appropriate data.
6. Tick off all the parameters that will be automatically updated using the feed. By default, all options will be active, but if you need some of them in your work, you can delete them.
7. Before you finally download the YML file, check that it is correct. To do this, click on the “Check file” button. Yandex will independently perform all the necessary checks, and if there are no errors, you can save the changes, thereby loading your YML files.

Checking the YML file for errors

Yandex Webmaster has a built-in XML feed tool that you can use to check errors. To use it, you must initially select a document validation scheme, and also point to the file or provide a link to the text or any other source of your YML files.

We would like to draw your attention to the fact that the system will still check your file as soon as you add it to the Webmaster service. And it doesn’t matter exactly how this document was downloaded — manually or automatically: errors can occur in any case, so checking them is mandatory.

In practice, when creating YML files, you may encounter the following errors:

• Critical errors. This is something that you will definitely need to fix. If you don't do this, Yandex.Market simply won't publish your products.
• General errors. This includes inaccuracies and oversights made during the process of filling out the elements. The system will publish such a price list, but the correctness of the data provided will be in doubt.
• Errors in sentences. You must understand that the product offer will be published on the Yandex market. This means that your potential buyers will see all the mistakes made in the position description. That is, if the system shows the presence of errors from this category, you will definitely need to fix them.
• Warning in sentences. These are not obvious errors, but inaccuracies that the system still recommends that you correct. Such offers will definitely be published, but they may still cause irrelevant clicks.
• Recommendations. Tips from the system for optimizing the price list will be presented here. If you use them, you will be able to increase the number of clicks on Yandex.Market and, accordingly, increase the number of orders.

What is the difference between YML files for search and for Yandex.Market

The system has different requirements for YML files. Thus, what will be mandatory for Yandex.Market can be safely omitted when preparing a price list for searching by product. Moreover, a number of elements can cause errors.

We are talking about:

• Bid: this is the bid you place for an auction on Yandex Market;
• Count: indicates the number of product items remaining in stock;
• Downloadable: relevant for virtual positions that users can download only after prepayment;
• Expiry: this is the expiration date of the product;
• Manufacturer_warranty: product warranty from the manufacturer;
• Supplier: indicates the OGRN or OGRIP of a third-party seller.

In reality there are many more such positions, so you need to familiarize yourself with them in advance in order to use them when creating a YML file.

Features of updating YML files

Updating a YML file — This is what will allow you to maintain constant up-to-date information about your product offerings. In this case, we are talking about the current price, the presence or absence of products in stock, terms of payment and delivery of orders.

The system recommends updating price lists on Yandex.Market at least once a month. In case it was downloaded through your personal account. If your YML file is located directly on the site, then changes will need to be made here every time the need arises, in particular when adjusting such key parameters as cost, quantity of products, etc. This work will be performed automatically. The system robot is able to download updated files during the indexing process. And this is on average 3-6 hours for commodity items and 30-40 minutes for cost. That is why a more reasonable solution would be to save the YML file on the site and configure it to update automatically.

The benefits of a YML file for contextual advertising

Another option that the YML file provides — This is the creation of advertisements for contextual advertising. This can be done for each product using specialized services, in particular the “YML Generator”. Here you will simply need to provide a link to your file and upload its results to the “Task List” in XLSX format.

This solution will be very convenient for online stores with a wide range of products. You can also select other software solutions that generate ads for contextual advertising based on data from YML files.

To summarize

As you can see, the YML file — a very convenient solution when working with any online stores, marketplaces and other trading platforms. With their help you can:

• Place trade offers in Yandex.Market, as well as in the product search from Yandex. This way you will significantly expand your contact with the target audience, which will have a positive impact on sales results.
• The file can be generated either manually or using third-party software or CMS plugins. The last option will be the most preferable, since it provides a comprehensive check of files for errors.
• When compiling a YML file, it is necessary to take into account the requirements that Yandex.Market places on them, as well as product search. There are minor differences here, which can ultimately have a significant impact on the stability of operation and the correctness of the information provided.
• Pay special attention to your website. The fact that the YML file will help bring more visitors to it – This is not a guarantee of a purchase. If the user does not like the site, if he considers it to be of poor quality, he will simply leave it.
• It is better to carry out all work with the system not directly, but through mobile proxies. This way, you will ensure anonymity and confidentiality of your online actions, you will be able to protect yourself from any unauthorized access, ensure effective bypass of regional blocking and access to sites from any country and region of the world. This means that you will open up unlimited opportunities for running your business.

In order not to waste time searching for a suitable solution, we recommend that you initially contact the MobileProxy.Space service. Here you can learn more about the functionality of this product, available geolocations, and cellular network operators. The service also offers a free two-hour trial before purchasing the product for each user. If you encounter any difficulties or additional questions, you can contact the technical support service, which operates 24 hours a day. Also pay attention to the current tariffs, as well as payment methods for mobile proxies.

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