How does a Product Feed work?

A product feed is a list of products used by e-commerce sites to send their catalogs to sales and marketing channels like Facebook, Google Shopping, Amazon and thousands more globally. 

Product feeds play a vital role in getting data from your online store to be listed on global marketplaces.

Each channel has specific requirements for how they want your product feed to look and how it should be structured. For example, Google specifies that each product must have an accompanying GTIN, while Miinto outlines that no brands may be included in product titles.

For digital marketers, product feeds are important as they need are the line between a successful online campaign and a waste of online spending.

What does a product feed look like?

• product titles
• stock information
• product descriptions;
• prices;
• availability
• color

What does a product feed do?

A product feed lets retailers:

• optimize the product information for different channels;
• optimize the search ranking of product description listings;
• publish information on promotions and discounts.

Through a product feed, sales channels can ensure your listings are automatically shown to the right shoppers at the right, for the right search queries. 

What are the benefits of an optimized product feed?

Better Quality Scores

As an online seller, the only thing you are providing to sales channels is your product feed.

This means that its the only thing for their algorithms to go on when they are looking at what listings should get shown to shoppers. So the information that you decide to include in your feed makes all the world of difference. The more detailed, complete and high-quality your data, the better.

Accuracy of your data

When you are selling online, there are a number of factors you have to complete to ensure success:

• Does the listings on your store match those on the channel?
• Has your inventory been recently updated?
• Have you included new promotions, products or sales prices? 

Having a mismatch between your online store and sales channels can lead to suspension, so product management is about getting the right information at the right time.

Effective Product Data

When you are paying for every click, impression and sale, you want to adhere to the recommended methods and techniques which you know will get you the sale. Managing your product feeds efficiently gives you the control over your data which you need. 

What options are available to merchants wanting to start selling on multiple channels? 

1. Using a spreadsheet to manually build product feeds.
2. Adding product feeds directly from your store using API.
3. Automated product feeds from feed marketing platforms.
   
   

1. Manual-built product feeds.

The clue is in the name here! It's up to you (or a costly third-party developer) to build and constantly manage product data using a spreadsheet that you have to update manually using Excel or Google Sheets etc. Every single time you make a change to that initial spreadsheet, it's up to you to re-import the file in a csv or txt format to each and every channel on which you're selling.

If this sounds time-consuming and long-winded that's because it is! Only consider this if you have a very small spreadsheet and a lot of time (or budget!) to spare.

2. Content API product feeds.

These use a connection between the host of your online store and the channel you want to sell on. Some ecommerce hosts like Shopify, Bigcommerce and 3dcart all have different versions of these API available in their app stores. 

The good thing about this is that it's quick and easy. The bad thing is the total lack of any kind of customization and optimization of your product data. It will be sent to those channels exactly as it appears on your online store. As we looked at above, that isn't always the best case when channels have their own specific recommendations and preferences for how they want your product feed to look and be structured. 

3. Automated product feeds.

Unless you are a first-time seller who has only recently created an online store, using automated product feeds is the best option.

Having the process automated saves digital marketers hours of time, meaning they can focus on other tasks and be safe in the knowledge that their feeds will be updated and optimized for each channel they're selling on.

The best technique to use when weighing up which product feed management tool to use is to look at the scalability of the product. If it lets you in at entry level for a low price and a basic package for optimizing feeds, as well as the features and support to allow you to scale up, then it's the tool for you.

Check out our Tool Comparison where we contrasted some of the key features of the available tools. 

About WakeupData

WakeupData is a Product Feed Management tool, which helps merchants on Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, Prestashop and many more to optimize their product feeds for ecommerce channels.

We support you every step of the way to set up integrations for your Google product feed, Amazon feed, Facebook feed and hundreds of other sales channels worldwide.

We offer a user-friendly interface, intuitive design and a Customer Success Team to deliver ROI through feed management and optimization through effective Data feed management.

Interested to hear more without having to commit to anything? Book your live demo and free evaluation today to hear more about our feed marketing and data integration solutions: