Product Feeds
A Product Feed allows an e-commerce site to transfer its catalog to comparison shopping engines, marketplaces, and affiliate platforms. It can also be used in Litmus Personalize to power product automation and personalization.
Product feeds are used by marketing channels, for example, Google, Amazon, and Facebook shopping to take merchant product data for the purpose of displaying product listings.
Here is an example of products powered by a product feed on Google Shopping:
Feeds are essentially a catalogue containing every product a brand has and provide all the information about each individual product. A product feed typically contains a product image, title, product identifier, marketing copy, and product attributes.
While product feeds differ in content and structure, the feed should deliver high-quality, accurate and up-to-date information to shopping channels so that shoppers can make a buying decision. A product feed should always reflect any and all data changes in store and in the inventory.
Feeds typically contain the following information (plus a lot more!):
- hosted image link
- product page URL
- product name
- product description
- price (was / now / sale)
- information on availability (stock level)
- date product added to the feed
- product category
- product type
- product color
- custom labels e.g. bestseller / sale / new / included in offer
Product feeds are typically ‘exploded’. This means that instead of containing one version of each product, the feed contains an individual listing for each size of the product (as in the example above). Instead of having dress 1 and 10 in stock, the product will be exploded to have dress 1 in multiple sizes and the stock level information for each size.
To ensure that the information presented is accurate and up-to-date with your real inventory, updates/adjustments to your product feed will be periodically required. The product feed should update as frequently as possible. The most common update frequency is every 4 hours, however, in some instances feeds update hourly or even daily.