Digital advertising has boomed in recent years with the rise of ecommerce. Many companies have launched or expanded their online shop, and this means they have to manage their catalogue on different sites, such as the company website, Amazon and social shopping platforms.

A product feed is an essential tool because it allows you to centralise all the information about your inventory and publish it on different channels easily. Read on to find out what a product feed is in marketing, the advantages it has and how you can create your own.

What is a product feed?

A product feed is a database that contains all the information about the different products in your online shop: product descriptions, inventory, stock, main features, etc. The product feed file can be in different formats, such as XML, CSV or TXT.

The information included in the feed will differ depending on the industry the company is in. For example, size is very important in an apparel ecommerce, while a technology ecommerce will have sections for screen size or the amount of memory on a device.

The main function of a product feed is to be able to send product information to different websites, such as marketplaces, price comparisons or online advertising tools. By having all the information centralised and automating the submission process, you can save a lot of time and avoid possible mistakes.

3 advantages of using a product feed in your ecommerce

1. Automate your marketing

Having one product feed makes managing your e-commerce much easier. Instead of having to constantly update different catalogues, just import your product information into the tool and create different feeds for each channel. From then on, the tool will update the different feeds automatically whenever there are changes.

2. Manage large catalogues with ease

As an e-commerce starts to grow, it becomes more and more complicated to manage. Catalogues with hundreds or thousands of products, multiple marketing and advertising channels, websites in different languages... trying to manage all this by hand takes up a lot of time and company resources. With a product feed, on the other hand, you can save a lot of resources to spend on other more profitable aspects of your business.

3. Better manage product information

A product feed is still a database, which means that it offers many functions to filter your products as you prefer. For example, you can select only products from a specific category or those with a certain feature.

In addition, product feeds also make it easier to optimise your data, e.g. by adding information, enriching texts or modifying titles. Contact us to help you with this process.

How to use a feed manager Different marketplaces have different specifications for product feeds. For example, on Merchant Center you have to include whether the product is new or second-hand as part of the feed attributes, while on other platforms this field is not important. If you sell on different platforms, you have to adapt your feed to each of them. Doing this process by hand is very inefficient: the reason to have a feed is to automate and simplify. How can we automate and simplify this process? With a feed management tool. Feed management tools allow you to optimise all your product information, e.g. exclude out-of-stock products, add or extract information in the title and description, create or edit text, etc. The tool itself will tell you what data you need in each feed, so you can be sure that you are always sending useful and complete information. To choose the best feed manager for your particular case, consider these details: Available channels: It is essential that the feed manager is compatible with the export channels you want to use. Price: Logically, you need to find a tool that fits your budget. You should also consider the payment method and whether it includes unlimited free support (the best way to avoid surprises). Update frequency: Depending on your shop's needs and demand peaks, you may need to update your tool several times a day. Be sure to check what update rate your source manager supports. Additional functions: Order management with marketplaces, tools for designing text ads or synchronisation with an analytics platform.