What is a product feed and why is it important?

Ever tried listing your goods online (like on Amazon or eBay) or paid for ads (on Facebook or Google Shopping)? If so, the concept of the product feed will be quite familiar to you.

When you know how to organise your product feed right, you save yourself a lot of time and effort. That’s because you really only need to do it once and your channels – from advertising aggregators and online stores to e-tailers and product comparison websites – will just pull in your data. Simply put, your e-commerce retail success starts with a proper feed, and here’s how you can get yours up to scratch.

 

Why Your Product Feed is Critical to e-Commerce Success

Creating a product feed can be done manually (like on a spreadsheet) or ideally,  enriched via a product management tool. Whichever you end up using, you will need to supply the key attributes of each of your products: product id, label, title, description, quantity, price, product image url, product url, gender, color, size, and so on.

What’s important about creating your feed is that you need to structure and organise your information, such that different vendors will be able to retrieve and display data in different ways. This is because every channel will have its own system, and your product details have to be optimised for every single one. 

Your feed works on both sides of your market. On the one hand, customers being able to find you relies heavily on product information that’s accurate and updated. And on the other, most sales channels will look at your product feed and decide whether or not to display your items on a search query. Put that way, your feed affects your advertising, too. 

 

 

4 Ways Your Product Feed Can Boost Marketing Efficiency

There are several ways that you can leverage your product feed to increase brand recall, website traffic, and conversion rate: 

 

All your product feed data in a central location

Your feed allows you to consolidate all your product information in one location. Once centralised, everything is within reach and you will be able to manage, update, and export high-quality data to your sales channels.

 

Instant updating across channels

With a correctly structured feed, you display all your information across multiple channels. You can add new products, removing stockouts, and so on, thus, improving your speed to market.

 

Tweak your product feed according to search behavior

Google and other search engines often modify their algorithms or adjust the criteria for displaying products on their results pages. When this happens, you can simply tweak your product feed to quickly react to changes, without disrupting your flow of business.

 

Using third-party solutions

From Google Shopping and Facebook to PriceGrabber and NexTag, all the e-commerce tools that you use to manage cart abandonment, ratings and reviews, site searches, and post-purchase campaigns, they rely on your feed to display listings and paid ads that best match user intent. 

 

A well-managed product feed allows you to push your products through multiple channels, without any additional effort or cost. This frees up your time for making the bigger, more critical decisions and focusing on scaling the business. Have a chat with us about how you can double your marketing efficiency, using just your feed.

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