Product data feeds, explained
How merchant product feeds work, what fields matter, and why feeds are becoming the primary way catalogues reach machines.
A product feed is a structured catalogue a merchant publishes for machines rather than people. It has existed for years in advertising, and it is now the mechanism by which a catalogue becomes legible to conversational and agent-driven commerce surfaces.
The fields that carry weight are identity fields: GTIN, brand, MPN, and a canonical link. Everything else — description, imagery, attributes — improves presentation. Identity determines whether your product can be matched to the same product elsewhere, which determines whether it can be compared at all.
Feeds are also the cleanest data source in commerce. A merchant publishing its own catalogue is authoritative about its own prices in a way no external reading can be, which is why feed-sourced values carry the highest confidence weight.
If you sell online, publishing a complete feed with real identifiers is the highest-leverage data work available to you. It is also the cheapest.
Keep reading
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How product identifiers relate, why check digits matter, and what to do when there is no identifier at all.
Data provenance in commerce data
Why every price should carry its origin and a confidence weight, and what goes wrong when it does not.