It is that time again: Today we’re going to give you a little insight into our trbo platform and its features. In the last Time for Product Insights article, we explained the email trigger. Today, we will show you what a product feed is, how it is used, and what problems can arise when you’re implementing product feeds.
What is an optimal product feed and what should it look like?
The product feed is a digitized file that contains the complete inventory of the merchant. For an optimal product feed, you should pay attention to the quality of the feed. This means that in addition to attributes such as item name, product description and picture, a detailed product description on the product detail page is essential for the success of the webshop. Likewise, the definition of price, currency, and the category is as important. In this case, attention should always be paid to ensure that the product data is well maintained, consistent and, above all, kept up to date.
Where are product feeds used?
Feeds are used to provide product data for sales channels such as Google Shopping, marketplaces or price comparison portals. With a professional feed management, they can also be used to control product campaigns. Product feeds are needed to use the trbo product logics. The product list is therefore a fundamental building block for your successful online shop. Depending on where the user is in the customer journey on the website, different product recommendations are displayed. The products for this are taken from the previously created data records.
Note: All product logics that are used in the trbo tool, such as top sellers, recommended products, items that are often bought together, and many more, require a complete and updated file list.
Importing product lists with trbo
Preparing a product list in order to import it without errors can be very time-consuming and may come with some problems. An example: The product lists in your own merchandise management system are stored with prices. These are displayed in EUR and with a comma to separate them. But for the import of these CSV files, a separation with a dot is needed. For many companies, clarifying the CSV files and making them available for import involves a great deal of time and effort while blocking their own technical resources. trbo has recognized this problem and has worked diligently on and optimized the import settings in the tool.
For this purpose, new tool buttons have been integrated directly in the import area, which allow the user to take certain settings into account in advance. In our first screenshot you can see that the currency in EUR is to be removed and the comma is replaced by a dot.
The feed is only available as XML file? This poses a big challenge for many shop owners to convert the feed into a common CSV file. A new update now allows the conversion from XML to CSV and avoids the detour via an external pre-processing.
The second image shows an insight into the product lists of our tool. Here you can see the different types of feeds. In our example, there is a main article feed and a variant feed. At the same time, the active lists are displayed according to logics. In the import settings on the right side of the screen, you can see very well that trbo can handle any kind of source. And via the filter settings, there is now the possibility to include or exclude the column elements directly during the import.
In conclusion: By using the trbo tool, one directly has the possibility that the required product feed, regardless of origin and formatting, can be efficiently processed and controlled. This saves a lot of time that can be used for other marketing activities!