What is Product Data Feed Management

Nowadays, it's almost impossible for ecommerce businesses to stick with just one sales channel. But the more platforms you sell on, the harder it gets to effectively manage your listings across all of them. If you decide to update product information manually, it's only a matter of time before an error slips through and hurts your profits.

That's where data feed management comes into play. What's that and what's so special about it, you may ask? Is it good for easily uploading products to multiple channels? Or optimizing your data to bring the best results? Or maybe it'll help you organize your work in a single place? Let's answer these questions together. But here's a little spoiler: feed management can do all these things and much more.

In this article, we'll take a closer look at what product data feed management is, why Shopify stores need it, and how you can get the most out of it with best practices and specialized data feed management services.

Understanding Data Feed Management

First of all, what is data feed management? In a nutshell, it's exactly what it sounds like: the process of managing your data feeds. So, to fully understand the concept, we simply need to break it down and figure out each part: data feeds and their management.

A data feed (also often called product feed) is a structured file with a list of your offers. It contains every detail of your items, such as their title, price, availability, images, links to their pages in your store, and many others. When you want to show your goods on some sales channel, you would use a data feed to quickly upload the current information about many products at once.

The "management" aspect of our term in question is about working with the data feeds in the most fruitful way. However, this involves a lot more than just creating and neatly organizing these files. It's also about keeping your feeds healthy and error-free, controlling that all information in them is accurate, and even showing you how they perform. But the most important responsibility of feed management is, of course, refreshing the products on your sales channels with the latest changes.

Together, all these features tend to one goal: that data feeds give your online store maximum profits and benefits. Now, what benefits are we talking about exactly? Let's find out next.

Why is Product Data Feed Management Important?

We've covered the definition and know what we're dealing with, so next naturally comes the question of why a Shopify store would even need shopping data feed management.

The main purpose of data feeds is to help you expand to many new sales channels. However, each platform has its own vision of how the feed should look like. With the management system in place, you can easily tailor the feed to every specific channel. This doesn't only mean implementing the basic file requirements, though. Data feed management will also help you transform your feed's content for top performance, making your products easier to find and more appealing to customers.

Another key feature of data feeds, which is maintaining your listings up-to-date, also brings not just one benefit. Feed management ensures that the latest changes from your store are delivered to the sales channels almost in real time. From the buyer's perspective, this means no unpleasant surprises during checkout, a reliable seller, a smooth shopping experience, and a higher likelihood of completing a purchase. For retailers, these points translate into avoiding overselling, positive reputation, better customer satisfaction rates, and more conversions.

Already eager to get these advantages? That requires a lot more knowledge about product feeds than just what they are. We must also learn well the structure of a quality feed.

Key Components of a Product Data Feed

As we said earlier, the countless number of diverse sales channels resulted in just as many different sets of requirements. That is the reason why product feeds come in various shapes and formats. Regular TXT and CSV files, a complex XML structure, and even an Excel spreadsheet all can be valid data feeds. But the format simply determines how the content is displayed inside the feed, not the feed's content itself.

Product data, on the other hand, is represented using a list of attributes, which varies between sales channels. Typically, these required attributes are common to many of them:

ID. A combination of numbers and letters that uniquely identifies your item. The most frequently used identifiers are SKU, EAN, MPN, and ISBN.
Title (Product Name). A short explanation of the item you're offering.
Description. A detailed text copy that tells more about the item's features.
Price. Self-explanatory: how much customers pay for your item.
Stock availability. Whether the item is currently available for purchase.
URL (Product Link). The website address of the item in your store. If your product has variants, then each one must have a separate link that leads directly to that variant.
Images. The URLs of the item's images (not the images themselves). Often this attribute is split into two: a link to a primary image and a collection of links to extra images.
Category. The store section your item is organized into. Many channels require that you use their categorization here, but sometimes you can use your own custom categories.

This is by no means a complete list. It will always be extended with additional necessary values that will depend on the type of products you sell. For example, apparel retailers usually must also state the product's Brand, Size, Color, Material, Age Group, Gender, and Condition.

Before you actually start creating the product feed, it's a great idea to check your platform's merchant documentation for the exact feed specifications. We also recommend that you read our in-depth article about Shopify product feeds for more information on this section's topic.

We've been continuously talking about new channels you can sell on using product feeds but never mentioned what specific types of channels these are. Therefore, we'll look into that now.

Types of Ecommerce Channels That Use Product Feeds

Before we return to the ecommerce product data feed management process, we should first clear out which types of channels data feeds can help you connect to. Once you better understand the opportunities each channel group offers, you'll be able to plan your business growth strategy more wisely.

So, let's take a closer look at the main types of sales channels you can join with product feeds, as well as the advantages you can get there:

Product search and comparison sites

On search and comparison sites, users can, as the name suggests, find and compare offers from different merchants. However, these platforms don't allow visitors to buy goods. Instead, they redirect visitors to the seller's store to continue shopping there.

Such sites are perfect for attracting interested customers who are close to making a purchase. You can also promote your listings in the search results, making your items more visible and further increasing traffic to your online store.

The most renowned global product search engines are Google Shopping and its main competitor Bing Shopping. You can create ad campaigns and boost your listings on both of these platforms through Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising, respectively. There are also dozens of other product comparison sites that focus on certain regions, such as idealo, PriceRunner, PriceSpy, and Akakce.

Marketplaces

An online marketplace is a platform where customers can buy products from third-party merchants without even needing to leave the site. This means that when shoppers check out and pay for the goods, they do it not on the seller's website but directly on the marketplace.

Marketplaces have established audiences that regularly use the platform and consider it reliable. Thus, if you show your products here, all these visitors will become your customers and will trust your brand more. In addition, payment isn't the only thing you won't need to worry much about: marketplaces have many other features, such as remarketing and cross-selling promotions, that'll help you sell more with less effort.

Prominent marketplaces include Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Target, Bol.com, and Heureka.

Platforms for sharing thoughts and exchanging content probably aren't the first thing that comes to mind when you think about channels to sell on. But as social media tremendously grew and evolved, so did the possibilities for businesses there.

Social media platforms are great for building your brand's image and advertising your offers. If your goal is to spread the good word about your business and strengthen the relationship with your customers, then this is the place to go. Many social media sites now even have functionality for selling items directly on them, which is a pleasant bonus.

Currently, the world's liveliest social media platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and Snapchat.

Affiliate networks

Affiliate marketing networks help you connect with affiliates, also known as publishers, who will promote your products on their online resources for a small fee. These platforms are certainly not about direct sales but rather about creating long-term profitable partnerships.

Thanks to affiliate networks, you can quickly find verified influencers, bloggers, email marketers, and many other publishers without wasting too much time researching their credibility yourself. And together with these valuable partners, you'll be able to reach new highly targeted audiences all over the world. Moreover, your partner's good reputation will positively fuel yours as well.

Some of the biggest international affiliate marketing networks are Amazon Associates, CJ Affiliate, Awin, Webgains, Rakuten Advertising, and ClickBank.

The Process of Product Feed Management in Shopify

Now that we've learned the basics of product feeds, we can delve deeper into how their management works and see what's under the hood of this intricate process.

The key steps of product data feed management include:

Data collection. First of all, you go to your online store and gather the information about the products you want to add to the feed.
Data formatting. Next, you organize your data for the necessary feed structure. For example, if you needed a CSV feed, you'd separate product attributes with commas.
Data optimization. After that, you check your data for compliance with your chosen channel's requirements, as well as enrich it for better performance.
Feed creation. You then create the feed file itself and write your product data into it.
Feed validation. You once again make sure that the prepared feed follows your target platform's ruleset and has no errors.
Feed connection. The moment of truth: you upload your data feed to the sales channel.
Feed monitoring. You continue to monitor your feed and track how your listings perform on the channel.
Feed maintenance. Your product information has changed, so you repeat all the previous steps to include the updated data and reupload the fresh feed.

Sounds lengthy and complicated, doesn't it? That's why special product feed software and data feed management tools exist. These applications are designed for seamlessly integrating data feed management with your online store, automating most of the steps above. What's more, with such apps, instead of managing listings on each sales channel separately, you'll be able to do it from a single place.

Adding such robust systems to your workflow is rightfully considered one of the best practices for shopping data feed management. Speaking of which, now we're going to share with you a few simple tricks that will help you manage Shopify feeds more easily and effectively.

Best practices for Shopify Product Feed Management

Best practices are called so for a reason: they are tried and tested, polished, and proven to give the biggest benefits. While it doesn't matter when you adopt them, the earlier you do it, the sooner you'll reap the rewards. So, as a bonus, here are several handy tips that'll help you achieve success in product data feed management much faster:

Use data feed management systems

Gone are the days of creating, updating, and reuploading data feeds to all channels manually. After a one-time setup, a management tool will then on its own generate a feed, perfect it for any platform you need, and regularly send your channel a new file with fresh listings. What's more, this whole process usually requires only a few simple button clicks from you.

Give your products impactful images

Images are the first thing shoppers pay attention to, so make them memorable and informative. Take a few clear shots of solely your product on a plain background, showing it off from all angles. You should also add several more pictures of the product being used in action. In total, we recommend that you provide at least 4 images per item.

Write structured product titles and descriptions

After images, titles and descriptions are the second things that catch the customer's eye. Together, these two attributes should tell buyers even the smallest details about your product. They'll also help shoppers find your goods more easily if you organically mix in relevant search terms like the product's size, color, brand, and material.

We've written about product title optimization for online stores in our blog before, so be sure to check this article out to learn more about techniques for composing great titles.

As for descriptions, create an engaging copy that highlights not only your item's main features but also the benefits that customers will get from your product. We advise you to present information in an easy-to-digest manner using small paragraphs and bulleted lists.

Include all available attributes to the data feed

Images, titles, and descriptions are, without a doubt, the most important product attributes, but you shouldn't forget about other, more specific attributes. Especially since filling your product feed with as much data as possible will give you two major advantages. Firstly, your offers will be more discoverable in both plain searches and searches with enabled filters. And secondly, shoppers will trust you more for openly sharing all the information you have in a convenient, structured manner.

Choose an optimal data feed update schedule

Do you know when your newest data feed will be next uploaded to your sales channel? We strongly encourage you to research this question. Certain sales channels may only fetch feeds at one set time, so you will have no choice but to adapt to this limitation. However, some channels may give you the freedom to choose an interval from several options. In this case, you can then edit the feed's upload frequency to better align with your business needs.

Constantly look after your data feed

Feeds aren't something you just set up and leave be. The ecommerce market never stands still, thus you must always monitor how well your feeds are keeping up with it. If you're using data feed management services, familiarize yourself with their analytics modules. The statistics these tools gather will help you quickly spot products that underperform and determine the cause of that low, whether it's poor data, uncompetitive pricing, or the off-season.

Data Feed Management for Shopify at Mulwi

Great, you've decided to invest in high-quality data feed management software, but how do you choose the right one for your ecommerce business?

Since each business is unique, it's impossible to find a universal solution that fits everyone. However, there are a few core features we recommend that you look for when picking a data feed management service for your Shopify store:

It scales and adapts to your needs. Your future choices for further expansion shouldn't be limited to the tool's capabilities. Seek for software that has easy Shopify product feed management processes for a lot of diverse sales channels.
It integrates smoothly with Shopify. Ideally, your software should run directly in Shopify so you don't have to leave the store admin at all. After all, why would you want to go outside of the platform you already know best?
It effectively optimizes your feeds. Support for many channels won't benefit you much if your feeds perform poorly there. Thus, a great data feed management tool should automatically help you optimize your feeds for top results.
It lets you freely customize feeds. While the software does most of the personalization automatically, you still need to be able to manually change the feed's content yourself to have full control over the presentation of your products.
It can localize feeds for any market. This is vital for selling internationally, as many channels accept only region-adjusted product feeds. Plus, most shoppers prefer buying from stores that speak their language and sell in local currency.
It offers extensive support options. Problems can arise at any time, so feed management shouldn't be the only service you focus your search on. Your tool must also come with a detailed knowledge base and an expert-led support team.

At Mulwi, we know very well how important these must-haves are. That's why we've combined all these qualities and more to create a complete, hassle-free, and user-friendly data feed management experience.

Built for Shopify and with Shopify stores in mind, our Mulwi Shopping Feeds app can easily connect you to 200+ sales channels directly from your store's admin panel. With Mulwi, you'll quickly master ecommerce shopping data feed management, even if you have no technical background. What's more, our seasoned support team is always ready to help you craft a personal, success-attracting feed at no extra cost.

Ready to streamline product feed management, grow your business, and boost your sales today? You're just one click away! Simply install Mulwi from the Shopify app store.

Summary

Selling on multiple channels is essential for ecommerce businesses, but it doesn't have to be exhausting and overwhelming. By using shopping data feed management, you can effectively organize and automate your work with listings across any number of sales channels. And with dedicated software, you'll seamlessly connect data feed management with your Shopify store into one simple yet powerful workflow. Try out Mulwi today and see for yourself just how easy and enjoyable managing data feeds can be.