What is product feed management? Essentials to get you started

It is essential for e-vendors to be present on online sales platforms, to boost visibility. Yet to start off in this field, and switch from a home-made product catalogue to a list of offers on these platforms, you need to know all the ins and outs of product feed management.

In a nutshell, a product feed is a file made up of different pieces of information drawn from your product catalogue. Typically, it could be a spreadsheet with one product per line and as many columns as there are data types to input: name, brand, category, price, colour, size, GTIN code, delivery method, return conditions, etc. This file can be used to send a product catalogue to an external marketing channel without having to send every item manually.

Product feed management: an essential marketing driver

Yet it is also much more than that, as your product feed needs to be specifically tailored to the target site, to meet its standards. Yet adapting your product catalogue to each site’s requirements, and updating and enriching it regularly, can become quite a tedious task.

This configuration work is known as product feed management. It consists in:

• modelling raw information concerning your products, so it meets the criteria specific to each advertising medium. These specificities are different for Amazon, Google Shopping, Facebook Marketplace and all the others;
• managing the data pertaining to your products using the tools made available by the platforms (such as Google Merchant Center for Google Shopping or Google Shopping Actions).

This makes product feed management a key marketing driver for online sales.

The importance of product feed management tools

The configuration of a product feed requires special skills and sound knowledge of recipient platforms. This is why so many e-vendors work with product feed management solutions – a tool used to configure, export and manage product feeds on each specific network. This tool boasts other advantages, such as:

• optimised logistical management,
• automated updates for product- and stock-related data,
• enriched product information, to adapt the feed to a given channel,
• customised marketing campaign configuration according to the recipient site (for example, adapting to a special price policy).

All you need now is to get started with some help from a product feed manager such as Lengow!