A data feed is a transmission of inventory information from a system's sever to another one. A shopping search engine shows different costs for products to potential customers. So what happens if you mixed the two together?
Amazon, Google Base, Yahoo Shopping, Pricegrabber, plus a few more famous names. These are all websites which are go to sites for prospective shoppers looking to buy something online (from an inexpensive toy, to an expensive house), or if not really buying, then to at least get some picture of the cost for a brick and mortar shop. Since sites like these happen to be the ones that potential buyers are browsing, anyone wishing for larger exposure of what they sell most likely are going to have some of these listed a few or many of these platforms. Taking the required amount of time to add products to sites such as these often goes a long way to expanding your sales. However, listing products (one by one, one field to the next, and picture after picture) is a drawn out and labor intensive necessity if you have many items to sell.
Did you know that manual insertion often is not needed for a large percentage of the sites that people will want to upload to? This is true since most of the famous comparison shopping engines have begun to offer users the capability of uploading site specific formatted data feeds. A data feed, when it comes to these comparison shopping engines, basically is a list of columns that you need to fill in with product features and specs , and will mostly be in excel CSV format or tab delimited TXT format. Here is a sample of what could be included (naturally keeping in mind that the format should appear as if it were like an excel sheet).
Cell 1 = Product Name, Cell 2 = Price, Cell 3 = Location, etc., with many more possible fields.
Using this example, if you wanted to make a product data feed sheet, it would look something like this (still keeping in mind it is formatted to mimic an an excel sheet).
product name Price Location
Superman DVD $12.65 New York
Where data feeds start to prove their worth is their ability to upload multiple products within the same sheet. So using the example used before, my product was a Superman DVD. Now, let's assume I also want to sell some more movies such as a Spiderman DVD. In order to include this film to my data feed, the only thing required is to insert the required sales information in the cells below my original movie. Here's an example.
product name Price Location
Superman DVD $12.65 New York
Spiderman DVD $9.95 New York
ect.
Using a data feed, you are capable of uploading your entire range of items for sale into a ecommerce shopping engine sites at one time instead of one at a time.
As an added bonus, assume that you have to make price adjustments to a few of your items that you have already uploaded. To do a quick change, the only thing needed is for you to change the price field within a hopefully saved data feed sheet to reflect the newly desired price, resubmit the corrected list to the site again, and the updated prices will now be shown online. Naturally this also works for each field you may want to alter.
These are all sites that use data feeds. Google Base, Yahoo Shopping, Shopzilla, Pricegrabber, Nextag, Shopping.com, Bing Cashback, Become, Smarter.com, Pronto, Amazon Product Ads.
Most important points.
1. Data feeds are included to make available multiple product uploading into a data base (comparison shopping engine site)
2. In order to use a data feed, fill in the required information into the correct cells.
3. When an item needs a change, this can be accomplished by altering the relevant information cells within a data feed sheet and resubmitting.
4. Most of the sites which you most likely wish to advertise on use data feeds.
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Gregory Mulford lives and works in Shenzhen, China, and has a deep interest in all things electronic.
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