Sticking with your feed provider can feel like the obvious choice when everything is already up and running. But a lot can change over time: your business grows, your priorities shift, costs increase, and AI and agentic commerce bring new requirements. As you plan for 2027, it’s worth asking how well your current setup is actually working for you today.
1. Has your feed management setup kept pace as your channels, markets, and catalog have grown?
Think about what you were managing when you first signed with your feed provider versus today. If you've gone from a handful of feeds to multiple marketplaces, ad platforms, retailers, and thousands (or millions) of products, has managing all of that become easier or harder?
Growth will bring some complexity. However, if support response times are getting longer, adding new markets and channels requires manual setup, and your team is spending more time keeping feeds running, your setup may not be scaling as well as your business.
2. Can you quantify how your current setup improved the quality of your product data and moved beyond basic feed optimization?
Beyond mapping and transforming existing attributes, consider whether your setup can identify data gaps and enrich missing or incomplete product information at scale.
For example, can it enrich thousands of SKUs with conversational attributes such as product highlights, use cases and occasions, differentiators, and Q&A-style content? And can your team review and approve that AI-generated product data before it goes live?
For agencies and multi-brand teams, also consider whether enrichment rules can be adapted by client, category, market, or channel rather than applying the same output everywhere.
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3. When feed issues come up, how easy is it to understand what went wrong and fix them?
You probably already know the answer to this one.
When products get rejected, or something looks wrong in a feed, can your team quickly pinpoint the problem and fix it? Or does it turn into a chain of support tickets, waiting, and continuous “just following up on this” emails?
Feed issues happen. What matters is time to resolution, the speed of support, and how quickly your team can trace the cause and make the right fix to prevent further revenue loss.
If response times are longer or troubleshooting consistently takes more effort than resolving the issue itself, your current provider may be adding unnecessary friction.
4. Does your current service model align with how your team actually wants to manage feeds?
Product feeds are getting more attention from senior leadership, and increasingly the C-suite, as their impact on channel performance and growth becomes more visible.
At the same time, the way your team works has likely also changed since you first chose your provider. You may have built more feed expertise in-house, reorganized responsibilities between ecommerce and technical teams, or taken on more complex requirements across multiple brands or client accounts.
Think about where your team sits now:
- Self-service: Your team has the technical expertise and resources to autonomously manage mappings, rules, optimizations, troubleshoot issues, test on the channel level, and make feed changes directly.
- Managed service: You rely on feed specialists to handle day-to-day operations, technical changes, optimization, provide strategic recommendations, and resolve issues as they arise.
- Hybrid: Your team handles core feed operations internally but brings in specialists for complex requirements, optimizing your catalog with conversational search attributes, migrations, new channel launches, or periods of higher workload (e.g., holidays and new campaigns).
There’s no single right model. What matters is having the flexibility to choose what works for your team today and change that balance as your needs evolve.
5. How quickly can your team adapt your feeds when channel requirements or business needs change?
Feed requirements change constantly. A channel may introduce a new attribute, update its taxonomy, change title specifications, or require a different value format. For example, Amazon recently introduced a 75-character limit for product titles, requiring sellers to adapt titles across affected listings.
Internally, you might need to adjust pricing logic, exclude certain inventory, or roll out a promotion across multiple markets. The real test is how much work one change creates.
- ❓ Can you update shared rules or mappings once and apply them across relevant feeds?
- ❓ Can you make bulk changes across different markets or client accounts?
- ❓ Can you test changes before they go live and quickly identify which feeds will be affected?
If you have to recreate the same update feed by feed, small changes can quickly become large operational projects.
6. Are your feed management costs aligned with the value you receive?
Higher costs can make sense as your business grows. But it’s worth checking whether the value has kept pace.
- What are you paying for?
Look beyond the base subscription. Factor in additional feeds and markets, managed services, feature add-ons, transaction fees, and any marketplace revenue-share costs.
- What are you getting in return?
Consider whether those costs have brought measurable improvements: less manual work, faster launches, better support, stronger product data, strategic recommendations, or new capabilities your team actually uses.
- How could you reallocate the thousands of dollars going toward marketplace revenue share?
From improving profitability to making that much-needed new hire, funding new campaigns, or testing new channels, there’s a lot you could do with budget that would otherwise go toward marketplace revenue-share fees.
- Has the value kept pace with the cost?
If you're paying considerably more without seeing a comparable improvement in what your team can do, it may be time to reassess the value you're getting from your feed management provider.
7. Is your product data optimized for conversational search, on both established channels and emerging AI discovery surfaces?
Conversational product data isn't only relevant to LLMs. Richer attributes can improve how products are understood and discovered across search, marketplaces, retail platforms, and emerging AI channels.
Look at whether your existing setup can support both traditional and newer destinations.
- Check your product data: Can you enrich your catalog with conversational attributes at scale?
- Check your current coverage: Can you manage feeds for Google, Meta, marketplaces, and retailers alongside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot?
- Check the technical setup: Does your provider support the required APIs, SFTP connections, structured files, and platform-specific feed formats?
8. Beyond sending product data to new AI platforms, do you know how your products are actually showing up there?
A successful export tells you the data was delivered. It doesn't tell you what shoppers actually see. There are three useful things to look for:
- Are you appearing? Track whether your products (and brands) surface across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
- How are you appearing? Look at visibility by product category, model, shopper intent, and sentiment.
- Who appears instead? Compare your visibility with competitors across the same prompts and product categories.
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9. Can you turn performance and visibility insights into actionable product data improvements?
Say you discover that your products rarely appear for a particular type of AI shopping prompt. Or competitors are consistently being mentioned for an attribute or use case that isn't clearly covered in your own product data.
What can your team actually do with that information?
Ideally, the next step shouldn't be another spreadsheet or dashboard. You should be able to identify the gap, improve the relevant product information, send the updated data out, and see whether it makes a difference.
See the gap → fix the data → publish → measure again.
If those steps live in completely separate tools and workflows, turning insight into action gets much harder.
10. Is changing feed providers worth exploring?
After years with the same provider, switching can feel like a daunting task.
In reality, you likely already have much, if not everything, you need to make the move, including established mappings, data transformation rules, channel configurations, source connections, and working processes. And the good news? There are dedicated experts whose job is to manage the entire migration from end to end.
Did you inherit your current feed provider subscription from a former colleague or another team? A migration can be a good opportunity to rethink how your feed operation is set up and decide what’s actually worth carrying over. Old rules can be removed, duplicate workflows consolidated, and processes simplified rather than recreated exactly as they are.
Who knows? You might even uncover unexpected cost savings and faster feed processing along the way.
As you plan for 2027, it’s worth taking a closer look at the state of your product feeds, how confident you really are in your current feed provider, and what your team needs for its next phase of growth. If slow support, a lack of partnership, unexpected increases or hidden fees, or simply the growing challenge of defending your current feed provider to leadership has taken its toll, it may be time to explore other options.
If some of these questions have raised concerns, a complimentary feed audit can help you take a closer look. It can give you a clearer view of what’s working, where the gaps are, and whether there’s a case for change you can confidently take to leadership.
Not sure if your current provider can keep up?
Request a personalized feed audit and get expert insights on your current setup, channel coverage, and opportunities to improve.
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