A product feed is a file that contains all information about the products of a specific company or companies in the e-commerce industry. Product feeds supply the content that is presented on many kinds of e-commerce websites such as search engines, price comparison websites

Price comparison service

On the internet, a price comparison service allows individuals to see different lists of prices for specific products. Most price comparison services do not sell products themselves, but source prices from retailers from whom users can buy...

, affiliate networks

Affiliate networks

An affiliate network acts as an intermediary between publishers and merchant affiliate programs. It allows website publishers to more easily find and participate in affiliate programs which are suitable for their website , and allows websites offering affiliate programs to reach a larger audience...

, and other similar aggregators of e-commerce information. In some cases they are generated by the online retailer and in some cases the information is extracted using web scraping

Web scraping

Web scraping is a computer software technique of extracting information from websites...

 or harvested web harvesting

Web harvesting

Web harvesting is commonly used to describe Web scraping from a multitude of sites. It also refers to an implementation of a Web crawler that uses human expertise or machine guidance to direct the crawler to URLs which compose a specialized collection or set of knowledge...

 from the online shops website.

Product Feed Applications

Product feeds are an integral part of online live scores

Live scores

Live scores is a type of service offered by many sports-related websites and broadcasters as well as online sports betting operators. The idea of live scores is to provide real time information about sports results from various disciplines. Live scores are usually free and are very popular among...

, sales and marketing, particularly in the case of online retailers with many different products or with products that are described by many different attributes, or in industries in which pricing and availability frequently change.

Product feeds are used within a variety of online marketing channels that help shoppers locate the product they wish to purchase and drive the traffic to the retailers' website. These marketing channels include:

1. Price comparison websites
   Price comparison service
   On the internet, a price comparison service allows individuals to see different lists of prices for specific products. Most price comparison services do not sell products themselves, but source prices from retailers from whom users can buy...
   
    - Feeds are the product descriptive content needed to run sites that compare pricing (price comparison websites), attributes (mostly in vertical search portals) and availability.
2. Paid search affiliates - PPC campaigns use API's that receive a range of attributes within product feeds to determine campaign keywords and bidding.
3. Affiliate networks – affiliate networks funnel products though their platforms from merchants to affiliates.
4. Marketplace
   Marketplace
   A marketplace is the space, actual, virtual or metaphorical, in which a market operates. The term is also used in a trademark law context to denote the actual consumer environment, ie. the 'real world' in which products and services are provided and consumed.-Marketplaces and street markets:A...
   
   s – receive product feeds from their big merchants (eBay and Amazon for example).

Feed formats

• Google base supports tab-delimited text format and various XML formats including RSS1.0, RSS2.0, and Atom feed format.
• Other product listing sites use proprietary formats that are either plain text or XML format.
• Emerging RDF format: Semantic web standards such as RDF are taking root. It is expected product feed will soon adopt this new web standard.