What is product feed management?

What is a product feed?

A product feed, also known as a product feed, is a standardized and unified file that contains information about the products sold in the store. Most often, this data includes items such as the product identification number, its description, photos, and availability.

The file does not have to be readable or convenient for a human - its purpose is to automatically communicate the store's offer in external systems, tools, marketing or sales channels such as price comparison websites and marketplaces.

According to some of the statistics, up to 60 percent of world internet users use marketplaces and price comparison websites. In Poland, the most popular marketplace is Allegro, which was used at least once by 89% of Polish internet users.

In fact, no e-commerce owner can afford to ignore these channels.

How to manage your product feed

According to the simplest and most intuitive definition, managing a product feed is to ensure its highest quality and up-to-dateness. As part of the management, it is also possible to regularly export this file to tools that use it, such as the aforementioned price comparison websites, marketplaces, or social networks.

What constitutes product feed management

The main task of the feed is to easily and quickly provide external marketing tools with the information they need to correctly display information about the store's offer. However, it is much more than just filling in the appropriate fields and formatting correctly. In this case, two main categories can be mentioned:

1. Feed optimization
   Feed optimization includes all technical aspects related to the preparation and distribution of the file. This includes adapting it to the requirements of all portals with which the company intends to cooperate with - and these have not developed a common format and each has its own policy.
   With a properly optimized feed, there is no risk that external portals will incorrectly retrieve data or make mistakes related to the availability of the product.
2. Source data optimization
   Source data optimization covers all aspects related to the data itself - including descriptions and photos. This element of source data management is intended to improve the user experience and get the user to buy it.
   A good example of the difference between optimizing the feed and optimizing the source data is the rewording of the product description. If it was necessary to meet the character limit imposed by an external tool, it is a feed optimization. Many channels place different demands on the parameters to be passed on in the feed. In practice, this means a need to prepare different experts for each of the channels used. If we do not have the comfort of editing data at the source, then it is worth passing the import data through a set of rules adjusting the product feed file.

Ways to prepare a product feed

Depending on the size of the store and its assortment, product feed management may only be an element of the owner's everyday life or, if the store has tens of thousands of products with constantly changing availability, one of the most labor-intensive elements of running an e-commerce business.

Manually

Many stores manage their feed manually - and that might be enough. Popular e-commerce solutions such as Magento or Shopify often allow the owner to export the product data file in the format required by the most popular marketing channels. If the result of this export is a static file (such as .txt or .csv), it will need to be patched and updated manually.

Depending on their needs and preferences, a company may then correct or modify the received file, but these are still manual manipulations. If the data changes, for example, a store decides to launch a promotion or one of the products disappears from the offer, you will have to prepare the export again.

Automatically

If the store platform allows you to export the product feed with the use of dynamic values ​​- this inclusion of product data will be much easier in the ecosystem of our marketing automation. Nevertheless, preparing product files for many parallel channels can still be a very time-consuming and often demanding activity.

Solutions such as feedink allow for far-reaching automation of product feed management. In this case, the machines can take over not only the update of the file itself but also the application of the rules.

Product feed and omnichannel marketing

Product feed is one of the basic tools that enable marketing and sales in the omnichannel model. It is a properly configured and prepared product file that provides customers with access through platforms such as Ceneo, Facebook, or Google.

According to Statista data, a coherent omnichannel strategy was very important for 47 percent. companies from the e-commerce sector in Europe and the USA. In turn, 20% indicated that the strategy is "quite important". Thus, only every third company does not consider it an important field of activity for an e-commerce company.

At the same time, each of these platforms, although they appear to be similar, requires a file constructed in a different way. The differences include:

• Required fields - these are the fields that must be completed for the file to be correctly read and imported into the portal infrastructure. Most often these are fields such as product name, EAN, photos, and description
• Optional fields - these are fields that may or may not be completed. This could, for example, be video footage accompanying the product description or data on potential allergens in the product
• Custom fields - some portals allow you to prepare your own fields with description and additional information
  

The above fields are not the same in all partner websites and use the same values ​​to describe them. Thus, in practice, there are differences between product files for different partners - small enough to be easily overlooked by a human, and significant enough that if the files are wrong when shipping, the partner's portal will not display them correctly or not at all.

At the same time, with full automation of the product file management, it is possible to operate efficiently and without errors on almost any external portal that allows integration.

Benefits of proper product feed management

A unified and transparent product feed management policy allows for much more efficient cooperation with external tools and marketing channels such as price comparison websites or affiliate networks. However, this is not the only benefit.

• All information in one place - by automating the management of the product feed, it is possible to make all changes and make corrections in one specific place.
• Full control - product feed management is one of the elements of marketing automation. If the control is carried out from one place, it is possible to introduce changes and corrections to all tools using the feed at once, which reduces the risk of error and shortens the work time
• Development - product feed is a tool enabling communication with other tools. Thus, it is very likely that the next emerging channels will reach for the product feed, and having a tool to manage it will allow for more efficient and faster launching of activities in them.

Summary

Product feed is one of the less visible elements of everyday e-commerce activities. However, it can be compared with the back office, without which efficient operations are impossible.

If you want to learn more about product feeds and the benefits of using them correctly - contact us!