Product Feed
A structured file listing every product a merchant sells and its attributes, built to be exported to other platforms.
What is Product Feed?
A product feed is a structured file (commonly a spreadsheet-like CSV, a TSV, or an XML document) that lists every product a merchant sells along with attributes like price, availability, and images, formatted specifically to be handed off to another platform. A merchant sends the same underlying catalog to a search engine, a marketplace, and a social ad platform as three separate feeds, each shaped to that platform's required format.
Why it matters
Feeds are built around a specification the receiving platform publishes and enforces: Google Merchant Center's product data specification, for example, lists required attributes like id, title, price, availability, and image_link, along with formatting rules (English attribute names, underscore-separated multi-word values, currency matching the landing page) that determine whether a product gets approved or disapproved. Feeds are typically regenerated on a schedule, from hourly to near-real-time via API push, since stale price or stock data in a feed directly causes checkout mismatches or "sold out" errors downstream. Because every destination platform maintains its own spec, merchants beyond a certain size commonly use feed management middleware to transform one master catalog into each destination's required shape rather than maintaining separate feeds by hand.