Feed scheduling: how often should you refresh each channel?

One of the most common questions from UK ecommerce teams: how often should I update my product feeds? The answer varies by channel, product type, and how dynamic your pricing and inventory are.

Why update frequency matters

Every hour between a price change on your website and that change in your feed is an hour of ads showing incorrect data. If you dropped prices 10% for a bank holiday sale at 9am but your feed refreshes at midnight, you've run 15 hours of ads with the wrong price — causing Merchant Center flags, customer disappointment, and wasted ad spend.

Recommended frequency by channel

• Google Shopping: Daily minimum. Twice daily recommended for any merchant who changes prices or runs promotions during trading hours.
• ChatGPT Shopping: Daily for most merchants. Twice daily if you have rapid stock changes.
• Meta (Facebook/Instagram): Daily minimum. Out-of-stock products in Meta DPAs are the most common problem.
• TikTok Shop: Daily minimum. Hourly for fashion retailers with fast-moving inventory.
• Pinterest: Daily. More frequent updates don't meaningfully improve performance.
• Microsoft/Bing: Daily — same as Google Shopping.
• Awin: Daily minimum. Publisher price comparison listings are live 24/7.

When twice-daily actually matters

The case for twice-daily refreshes is specific: sale prices. A promotion that starts at 8am won't appear in Google Shopping until after your next scheduled feed fetch. If your standard schedule is 2am, that's a 6-hour window where Google is showing the wrong price — a price mismatch disapproval waiting to happen.

Twice-daily solves this for merchants who regularly run flash promotions, time-limited discounts, or who use third-party repricing tools that update prices multiple times a day. The second run at around 2pm captures morning price changes in time for afternoon and evening shopping traffic.

For most merchants with stable pricing and stock levels, daily at an off-peak time (2–4am) is sufficient. The key is consistency — a feed that always refreshes is better than one that sometimes refreshes twice and sometimes not at all.

The holiday and peak season exception

Whatever your standard schedule, temporarily increase to twice-daily during Black Friday week, Christmas, and any other peak trading period. Stock levels change rapidly, prices fluctuate, and the cost of showing out-of-stock products or wrong prices in Shopping ads is highest precisely when traffic is highest.

In Trajekt, you can switch between daily and twice-daily with a single toggle — no reconfiguration needed. Switch up before peak, switch back after. The feed URL in Merchant Center stays the same; only the generation frequency changes.

Manual refresh as a safety valve

Regardless of your scheduled frequency, a manual refresh option is essential for edge cases: you've just launched a new collection and want it live in Google Shopping immediately; you've corrected a batch of wrong GTINs; you've updated a category mapping rule and want to see the result in your next Merchant Center fetch. Trajekt's dashboard includes a "Run now" button for exactly this — trigger an immediate feed run without waiting for the next scheduled slot.

Optimal timing for UK ecommerce

• Primary refresh: 6–7am — captures overnight changes before peak morning shopping hours
• Secondary refresh: 12–1pm — captures mid-morning changes, useful for lunchtime flash sales

Event-based refreshes

Beyond scheduled refreshes, trigger manual runs before key commercial events: before a sale goes live (30 minutes before launch), when new products are added, when a significant stock clearance happens. Trajekt supports manual feed runs at any time alongside scheduled refreshes.