If you sell online, it’s paramount to showcase your products where your potential clientele is. Visibility is one of every seller’s biggest headaches. Feed management tools can be your great allies in achieving customer-facing visibility. If you are not familiar with them, here is a brief summary of their usefulness and function.
What is data feed management?
In a nutshell, it is a data management solution for your products to update them in different online stores and other networks such as marketplaces (like Amazon) affiliate platforms, price comparison engines or ad exchanges (advertising buying that usually takes place in real time), among other platforms.
The product feed, on the other hand, is the database that contains information from your product catalogue. It can be sent automatically from an ecommerce to external sales channels, thus expanding your virtual “showcase”.
Advantages of optimizing your product feed
Managing the product feed with a tool allows you to easily upload your product catalogue to any shopping platform (Google Shopping, Amazon, Facebook…).
In addition, your catalogue can be updated periodically so that all changes related to the products are reflected on all websites: price, availability units, or any feature that is important to a prospective buyer.
Optimizing your product feed is more cost-effective than if you update your product listings manually and ensures that product inventory and details are always up to date.
Not all feed management tools are the same
That said, each feed manager works slightly differently. In addition, each marketplace may have different specifications, which means you’ll need to adapt the feed to each platform’s requirements.
A good manager should meet two criteria:
- It should be easy to use. A feed management tool should simplify your work. Therefore, in addition to presenting a simple interface, it must also centralize your activity and be a scalable tool that allows you to grow alongside your inventory.
- It should include automation and task grouping. The goal is to save time, so the more tasks you can automate, the better. Also, if it permits additional activities such as creating dynamic ads for Google Ads or syncing your account with Google Analytics, you’ll have more opportunities for growth.
When choosing a feed management tool consider all its features, not just for the present day, but also for the future. For example, a tool that allows you to import your product catalogue independently, and then adapt it to different sales channels is ideal. Also, you’ll want a tool in which everything related to sales can be optimized from within the platform, such as inventory tracking or orders and sales tracking from the different platforms you are selling on. If you add integration with other ecommerce solutions to the mix of features available, you’ll have a really useful feed manager.
Your catalogue, always up–to–date
Your goal is to keep your product information always up-to-date and available regardless of the sales channel. Some actions that you can perform using feed management tools include adding additional information (colour, size…), excluding certain products (out of stock, no image available…) or creating automatic product descriptions that pull from dynamic fields.
It is important to choose the right sales channel based on the type of products you sell and analyse which ones are the most popular, not only for each retail sector but also in each country or region. If you need help choosing or managing the feed management tool that best suits your business’ particular situation, at All Around we can help.
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Managing Director
Andreas is Managing Director at All Around. He worked for years in leading roles and international projects at WPP and Publicis Group agencies. He now leads a multi-disciplinary team of marketing consultants from different disciplines, backgrounds and countries who have joined forces to deliver international digital strategies and measurable results for our clients.
