Keeping your product data feed clean and optimized is a critical technical aspect to running any eCommerce business. Sloppy product titles and descriptions will turn off potential customers, reduce your visibility in search and, in some cases, get you booted out of marketplaces.
What do we mean by a clean product data feed?
A clean data feed must have attributes assigned that are standardized, complete and accurate across all listings.
Why a clean data feed matters
Regardless of the marketplace or advertising channel you’re using, a clean product data feed will help you win more sales, as well as trust with customers who want to be able to rely on the data you present about your products.
With a clean product data feed, you benefit at least two ways.
- It makes you more efficient. A data feed that’s standardized, complete, and coherent is just plain easier to manage. It will be much easier to search and filter through your feed whenever the need arises, so you don’t get anomalies.
- You’ll see greater customer satisfaction. If you can meet their specific expectations, customer satisfaction follows. The last thing anyone wants is to be surprised once an online order arrives.
Below are the three practices that will help keep your data feed clean.
Standardization
After cleansing, all product attributes should appear using the same formats for currency symbols, decimals, and similar details.
Make sure recurring tags like brand names are expressed consistently across all your listings. Don’t leave off words or abbreviate some places but spell out in others.
Fluid product tagging is part of Shoppingfeed’s feed syndication services. It helps ensure that customized data such as color descriptions are assigned to the correct fields. So whether your color description says “Sky Blue” or “Midnight Blue,” the products will show up in a search for that item in “blue.”
Standardized product data makes it easier for your ad to surface in a keyword search. As noted earlier, it also makes it easier for you to search through your own data.
Completeness
Regardless of the size of the feed, it must be complete and show all the attributes required by any channel you are using.
Some of these may be optional, but it’s still best to be as thorough as possible. You want your information to answer any question a buyer might have. Many channel requirements change on a regular basis, so keep up to date with those as well. Think of it as scheduled maintenance.
Not meeting a channel’s specifications can result in rejecting your products, or even your entire feed.
Accuracy
In a clean data feed, product attributes will always be accurate and consistent between product title and brand, for example. It’s easy to assign the wrong brand when you’re going through a long list, but some close proofreading will keep it clean for you.
If product information is inaccurate or outdated, shoppers won’t trust it and will move on to another seller.
Miscellaneous errors: inventory and pricing, leftover code
Advertising products that are out of stock or incorrectly priced is penalty behavior in may marketplaces. Besides unhappy customers, you can be temporarily banned from selling on specific channels like Google or Amazon.
While proofreading your listings, in addition to the obvious things like grammar and spelling, make sure to remove any unwanted HTML code that you find.
A final note about optimization
While you are busy cleaning up your feed, it’s also a good idea to see how well it’s optimized. Have you included all the critical keyword attributes like brand, color, size, and features?
We’ve covered the optimization before, but it’s important to always be thinking about ways you can improve.
Your product descriptions should provide a detailed and engaging description, and it should not be stuffed with keywords. Instead, selecting a collection of relevant, high-performing keywords will help your customers find what they want.
Shoppingfeed syndicates search-optimized product listings on all of the world’s most powerful marketplaces, syncs and refines inventory data, and eases fulfillment with automated workflows.
