What is a Product Feed Builder? And why do I need one?

As an online merchant when first starting up a business, the focus quite rightly to begin with, is about the user journey, experience and getting this right for the valuable customers and potential customers who visit your web-store.

This is the core of your brand of course and you will no doubt have already poured a vast amount of time, energy, sweat, (maybe blood and tears also) into making sure that your product or service offering, your presentation of this offering and your easy, friction-less buying experience is the very best that it can be.

You will also without doubt continue to pour – any web presence in a consumer or commercial space is a constant battle with the moving forces of competition and customer expectations. You got this though.

Whilst this is where your plan starts this is far from where it ends, you are creating a ‘marketing machine’ that is fuelled by users and traffic. The e-commerce ‘gem’ that you have created needs to be experience by the widest audience possible for your business to meet it’s aims.

Part of this plan can be achieved without advertising – through natural (organic) search growth and/ or by social media activity. But it is accepted that a ‘mature’ digital marketing plan will have the best results if there is a blend of natural and paid for promotional activity.

This is where the need for product feeds appear. There are lots of great opportunities for you to access new markets and customers by leveraging one or all of the following types of advertising:

• Pay Per Click
• Affiliate Marketing
• Display Advertising
• Price Comparison
• Marketplaces

Of course as marketeers you still need to know your numbers in order to make these activities worthwhile in terms of profitability. What I mean is that it is the number one golden rule of marketing to know in fine detail both:-

• how much it costs exactly to supply the units that you sell
• and the lifetime value of acquiring a customer

Without these things – any advertising spend (and this applies to any business anywhere not just digital businesses) is a wet finger in the air rather than a calculated investment. But you know all this and have crunched the digits.

To get involved with these marketing/ advertising services an ‘entry requirement’ is to provide an up to date and accurate product catalog of the items that you can supply. Each of these will have slightly varying requirements in how they wish to receive this data. This is where Feed Donkey can help you.

Donkeys have been transporting products and goods to the markets they need to appear in for millennia, Feed Donkey specialises in data. Let the donkey take the strain for you 🐴. Feed Donkey is an automation tool that allows you to manage the product data update requirements for multiple channels simultaneously without increasing your admin burden.

You need to consider also that there are ‘just about good enough’ feeds that allow you to appear but not necessarily make the best of your spend. Feed Donkey has a fully featured builder toolkit that allows you to optimise. The better the quality of the information you can feed, the higher the quality/ visual appearance of your ads, the better visibility they will have and the better your results will be.

Our usefulness is not just limited to advertising however, there are several external services that you may wish to incorporate into your plan, that again could have a product feed requirement.

Software as a service solutions such as:

• Internal site search
• Product ratings and reviews
• Personalised product recommendations

So not only reach more customers, but improve your sites UX and conversion rate by getting access and optimising the data that you can send to these services.

Feed Donkey is an application built for Shopify. We have a Free Forever plan for small stores and every paid subscription comes with a fully featured unlimited 15 day free trial period.

Every plan comes with the offer that we will fully configure the first feed of your choice for free. When you have installed from our App Store page, talk to us (click the messenger bubble on the bottom right of the screen.

Best regards

The Feed Donkey Team