Category: Articles
Posted: Feb 2, 2010
Synopsis: Tutorial explaining e-commerce shopping feeds, the benefits of feeds, and how to create feeds.
Shopping cart feeds are a means for e-commerce store owners to provide their product listing to online shopping sites such as Froogle, Yahoo Shopping, Shopping.com and Shopzilla. These online sites provide exposure of the products to a much larger audience, often with external reviews, comparisons etc.
Feed Requirements
To properly list products, these shopping sites standardize the information required for product listing; this is done through use of a product feed. Feed requirements are outlined by the shopping site and information is validated using this format outline when submitted by e-commerce store owners.
Creating Feeds
E-Commerce feeds are usually created by programs that automatically generate information from a store owners product database, based on the format required format of the site being submitted to. Froogle for example, has different requirements than Yahoo Shopping, so the feed generator for one differs from that of the other. Depending on your shopping cart software, often feed generators have been created and can be purchased, other times you would be required to hire a programmer to develop such feed generators.
Uploading Feeds
Different online sites have different methods of uploading feeds. In most all cases, you are first required to create an account with the site you are wanting to submit to. Many sites require a fee. After creating an account, you will be provided information on how exactly to provide the feed to them. Sometimes these can require you to login and upload the feed, provide the feed to their FTP, email, or specify a url at which your feed can be accessed - often you are able to select a choice.
After establishing your account, you would then generate your feed, and provide the feed to the site using the specified/selected method. When your product listing is modified, you would want to repeat this process. Often sites have a product expiry (i.e. 30 days) so you would want to repeat this process to prevent expiry.
Another important note, is that feed requirements change from time-to-time. If Froogle for example adds a new requirement to their feed, your feed manager needs to be updated to reflect this change so your feeds reflect the requirements.
Feed Manager for X-Cart
If using x-cart, we provide a module called Feed Manager Pro for X-Cart which allows you to automate the creation of feeds for various popular sites. Using Feed Manager Pro for X-Cart you can change your feed mapping as requirements for feeds change, generate feeds and submit them automatically via email, FTP, download or save to the server, and can avoid expiry by using a cron-job to automate the resubmission of your feeds.
