Visibility is key to finding success in ecommerce. If customers can’t find your products, they can’t buy them. But one of the biggest roadblocks to increasing your products’ visibility is the listings themselves.
If you want to list your products on multiple sites – Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Google Shopping, Shopzilla, and more – you need to submit your product feed to each site.
And each site has different rules and procedures that need to be followed. If you make a mistake, your product may not show up in search results. Or – worse – that site could refuse to list it at all.
If you’re handling this process manually now, you understand the challenges. You have to constantly keep the product feed up-to-date. You have to allocate your marketing dollars appropriately to maximize your ROI and increase sales.
As a result, some companies struggle to manage multiple products feeds. Yet others seem to have their products listed everywhere. What’s their secret?
Three words: feed management software.
Here’s why feed management software works – and how it can dramatically expand your reach with minimal effort.
Time Savings
Managing multiple product feeds manually is a full-time job – at the very least.
Most smaller businesses simply can’t afford to dedicate a person to these tasks. Even if you could, hiring an employee just to manage your product listings would seriously cut into any profit you made.
Using feed management software means you don’t have to worry about this at all. The software handles all of it for you – and in a fraction of the time it would take a person.
You still have control – you can create rules and generate the copy yourself – but the day-to-day time-sucking parts of the work are handled for you.
Automation of Tedious Tasks
Managing your feeds isn’t just something that takes time; it’s incredibly tedious. That’s a problem for two reasons.
First, it’s a task that no one really wants to do. Even if you hire someone specifically to do it, you may have difficulty keeping them because they’re likely to find it mind-numbing.
Second, there are many opportunities for mistakes to be made. That’s important because just a few incorrect keystrokes can end up costing you big-time.
A feed management program prevents this by automating these tedious tasks and handling them with the accuracy and precision that only a computer has.
The software will take the data directly from your website and automate it to your data feed. That means no longer having to make changes on both your site and in your listings. This can especially come in handy when making changes such as price or quantity.
There may be some instances where you want the data in your feed to differ from what is on your site, and the software can handle that too. You can simply create customization rules to handle this. For example, you can create a rule that reduces the price by 15% for all products going to Walmart.
Optimization Tools
You know your listings could be better, but you’re not quite sure exactly what you should change. And it’s likely you’re too busy to figure out how to optimize for every single channel.
Use feed management software that includes optimization tools, and you’ll have guidance on choosing categories, crafting product copy, and following best practices.
The software will do the hard work for you, ensuring that your listings always look great and follow all channel protocols.
Title optimization comes into play here. When someone is already on your website, they have some background knowledge as to what you are selling. This is not necessarily the case when a person stumbles upon your listings. That's why it is crucial to optimize your data feed titles with keywords that are relevant to shoppers. As you may not want to change this information on your website, you can use a software's customization tool to create these changes for feeds only.
Around-the-Clock Reporting and Alerts
Typically, if you want to know how your products are doing on a particular channel, you have to seek out the analytics yourself, decipher what they mean, and then figure out how to make any necessary changes. At best, maybe you can set up reports or alerts from individual marketplaces to come to you.
In contrast, feed management programs come with alerts and reports that tell you what you need to know about your product listings on various channels all in one place. You can see how you’re doing across the board and on an individual-site basis whenever you choose.
And you can set up alerts, so if something ever goes wrong or requires your attention, you can deal with it immediately.
Closing Thoughts
If product feed submissions are holding you back from expanding your products’ visibility, look at what GoDataFeed offers. It may well be an investment that allows you to dramatically boost your online sales in a short period of time. If you have questions about how to optimize and/or automate your ecommerce campaigns, schedule a no-obligation consultation with a feed specialist.
