An online store no longer sells only on its own website. The same products appear in shopping search results, in advertising, on social platforms and, increasingly, in the answers given by AI assistants. Each of those reads your catalog through a product feed.
What a feed is
A feed is a structured list of your products that your store publishes and refreshes automatically: title, description, price, availability, images and identifiers such as brand and barcode. Each channel fetches it on a schedule. One feed, well maintained, can supply many channels.
What makes a feed work
- Accurate price and stock. A mismatch between the feed and the product page gets products disapproved.
- Clear titles. Brand, product, key attribute. Write for someone searching, not for your warehouse.
- Product identifiers. Barcodes and brand names let a channel match your product to what people search for.
- Good images on a plain background, at the size each channel asks for.
- Complete variants. Each size and color as its own entry, linked to its parent.
Common problems
- Products disapproved for a missing field that nobody noticed.
- A feed address that changed during a site update, so channels are reading an old copy.
- Several brands or stores, each with its own feed, maintained differently.
- A new channel connected through a brand-new app that has not been tested against your catalog.
Our advice
Treat the feed as a product in its own right. Check each channel’s diagnostics monthly. When a new channel appears, connect the feed you already trust before you consider anything more elaborate.
Related service: Websites & e-commerce.