E-commerce Solutions & Services
Given our broad exposure to the industry including both B2C and B2B as far as ecommerce goes and having worked with channel incubation companies and vendors of the top distributors across North America, we offer a wide-range of solutions and services depending upon your niche domain.
How Product Feeds Work for e-Commerce
A data feed is a file, from which another system gets information. Feeds are widely used in the e-Commerce, and product feeds are those that vendors use most often. They are structured files that contain a list of products and attributes of those products. This data is organised so that another system can retrieve and display it in a certain way. In other words, the product feed works like a data transmitted from your software that is formatted according to the needs of the endpoint system. The most commonly used file formats are XML, CSV, and TXT.
In the e-Commerce industry, feeds are typically used for syncing product specifications with merchant center and for paid online product listings to services like Google Shopping, Facebook Product Ads, Amazon’s Product Ads. Aside from paid advertising, merchants can use data feeds to export product information to marketplaces and various sale sites, facilitate upkeeping of their sites, boost the site’s performance, and enrich B2B e-Commerce software functionality.
For instance, wholesalers can use a product feed to send updated products lists to retailers. That considerably streamlines the process of adding the products to the retailers’ databases, hence new products will come to market much faster.
Product feeds also expedite the process of recognising latest changes by 3d-party site-search software. This sustains accuracy of the site’s search function and keeps it up-to-date.
Product Feeds for e-Commerce Sites
Another way to exploit product feeds is to add and maintain product content on your site with their help. There are special data feed management services for this, which can provide images and Rich Content for the products. They especially come in handy for those who are in a process of setting up an e-commerce marketplace online.
How to Create Your Own Feed
There are a few basic ways to generate a data feed:
Manually
This approach requires quite a lot of effort. The process typically implies retrieving data from a software system, although it can also sometimes include typing information for your feed, which can be applicable only if the product list is not very big, otherwise errors are practically inevitable.
Third-party solutions
There are a variety of software services that generate and manage feeds for merchants. They automate data feed management and facilitate data formatting for product listing ads, shopping engines etc. Some DFM systems make it possible for manufacturers to share various product information with distributors and retailers. By the way, some e-Commerce platforms offer pre-built data feed tools as well.
Custom integration
Most of DFM vendors charge monthly fees. So merchants may want to have an integration built into their e-Commerce software, which will automate data feed generation.
Where You Can Use Product Feeds
Shopping ads
Some ads services require product data feeds to determine the best possible time, place and manner of display.
Dynamic remarketing ads
Dynamic re-marketing ads utilize product feeds to display ads to only the most relevant returning customers, significantly increasing the click through rate.
Distributors and retailers
Resellers can update their product lists in no time if you provide them with new product data and an easy way to load the data onto their sites. Thus they will be able to quickly start selling new products and sell more.
Marketplaces
Data feeds help to easily keep product info up-to-date on marketplaces.