Shopping engine feed management
The only way to stay competitive in ecommerce is to go omnichannel — be available and recognizable to your customers everywhere they spend time online. How do you achieve this? By listing your business and products across all of the prominent ecommerce channels and providing standardized product information on these platforms.
However, manually creating and maintaining a consistent product feed to power listings and ads poses constant hurdles. Irrespective of the size of your business, manually entering, editing, and updating product data from time to time across ecommerce channels is time-consuming and error-prone. This calls for the need for an efficient system to manage your product feed: shopping feed management, or more commonly referred to as just feed management.
What is a shopping engine feed?
When your customers visit you in-store they shop by seeing the products displayed directly on your aisles and checking the packaging labels for product information, price, and other details. Similarly, when they visit your business online through platforms, like FlipKart, Amazon, Google Shopping, etc., they make a purchase decision by surfing through your product catalog – which includes product images, descriptions, features, prices, and other details.
A shopping engine feed is the product feed, which acts as the master source of truth for all of this information.
Imagine you are a shoe manufacturer and you sell your shoes on your website, Amazon, and Google Shopping. Now, if the material of a particular shoe varies on all of these three sites, which one should your customers trust? This leaves them confused and distrustful of your business. So how do you manage the consistency of your high-volume and ever-evolving shopping feed?
Understanding shopping engine feed management
Today, more than 81% of the US population shops online. Out of these, 85% decide whom they want to shop with based on the product details, images, and other specifications provided by the business. This is why it is important that you maintain a consistent shopping feed to power every shopping channel where your customers can find you.
Shopping engine feed management in simpler terms is a process that enables you to source, update, and distribute your product data across the internet to different shopping engines. Its functions include a) the creation of a product catalog with product images, title, specifications, price, how-to videos, reviews, etc., b) integrations with ecommerce channels via APIs, and c) product content optimizations as required by the channels’ standards. In addition, it automates the process of updating product data and synchronizing changes across all touchpoints, such as when you make an update to your product inventory. Shopping engine feed management curates a standard brand image and experience for your buyers retaining their trust and loyalty.
How can an efficient shopping feed management system help your business?
Are you a growing ecommerce business working to create a strong online presence? Then shopping feed management is the key. But it is not only about ecommerce. Did you know that almost 81% of in-store shoppers research online before they buy? Strong shopping feed management is just as important for physical stores.
Read More: Retail media in enhancing brand visibility
Here’s what a shopping feed management system can offer your business:
- High-quality product data
You can enhance and enrich your product feed media – product images, videos, descriptions, price – and build a consistent product catalog. The data can be optimized to adhere to the required formats, guidelines, and standards followed by every shopping engine, making your data uniform across the web.
- Quick and easy integrations
A strong shopping feed management system enables you to integrate effortlessly with multiple shopping engines and ecommerce platforms of your choice via robust APIs. Further, your product feed is synchronized across these platforms in no time, saving you the effort. This in turn improves your time to market and brand visibility, and in turn, boosts sales.
- Efficient product media
While preparing a product catalog, you often deal with huge volumes of inventory and media assets, like images and videos, making it complicated to synchronize them with your shopping feed. However, with the right shopping feed management software, you can manage the vast product data in a centralized platform and integrate them via APIs.
- Customized product feed
Your product data is customized with the most relevant keywords to ensure your products appear first when your target audience searches for your business and products or similar ones. This makes you easily reachable to your customers and increases your chances of making the sale.
- Updated product feed
Price, product images, and many other specifications constantly change. Or, you might want to update a new product you have introduced recently. Making these updates manually – with no errors – can feel like an impossible task. A shopping feed management system enables you to make all updates within one central location, which are then reflected across the channels you syndicate to.
Success in today’s ecommerce is all about consistent user experiences. Shopping engine feed management plays a huge role in maintaining a uniform brand image for businesses across the web, while freeing up time for them to focus on growth.
Learn more about how Productsup empowers global companies to maintain a consistent product and brand image as part of their omnichannel strategy. See the full capabilities of our feed management solution, Advertising PX, here.