Product feed
What is a product feed?
A product feed is a file or a URL that lists your products in a form a machine can read: id, title, description, price, availability, image and the link to the product page. A shop sends it to Google Merchant Center, to a Meta catalogue or to a comparison site, and the same mechanism can bring data in from a supplier or a warehouse. It refreshes on a schedule.
Example
A shop with 1,800 products changes the price or the stock of about 40 of them every day. Upload the feed once a week and up to 280 listings carry an old price or show something that has sold out. Google compares the price in the feed with the price on the page and drops the listing when the two disagree; a shopper who does order a sold-out item gets a cancellation instead of a parcel.
Generate the feed from the same data the shop runs on, refresh it hourly, and those 280 mismatches become a handful. Listings stay live, and the advertising budget stops paying for products that cannot be shipped.
One row carries the required minimum: a unique id, a title, a description, a price with its currency, availability, an image and the link. Branded goods add a brand and a barcode, and size or colour variants share a group id so they show together instead of as separate listings.
Why it matters for a business
The feed is your catalogue as advertising systems and comparison sites see it. The title in it decides which searches the product appears for, the image decides whether it is clicked, and the availability decides whether the order can be fulfilled. None of the three is fixed inside the ad account; all of it comes from the shop.
The same mechanism works inwards. A supplier sending a file of prices and stock can be read on a schedule so nobody retypes a catalogue, and when your stock lives in separate software this becomes an integration rather than manual work. In the shops we build, the feed is part of the online store build, not a separate export somebody remembers to run.
What to ask
- How often does the feed refresh, and does it read the same data the site does?
- Are variants grouped, so they do not compete as separate products?
- What happens to a sold-out item: does it drop out of the feed, or stay with its availability marked?
- Can there be separate feeds per channel, language or country?
- Who watches Merchant Center errors, and are they fixed in the shop or in the ad account?
- If a supplier pushes a file to you, what happens when their format changes?