Product data feeds

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  Product data feeds

One of the challenges of running an online store is to get your products and services known, so that potential customers can find your online store and hopefully make a purchase.

The reality is that simply creating an online store and then sitting back and waiting for orders to start flowing in is not a good strategy. Without marketing and the promotion of your store, you will not make any significant sales.

Apart from the more obvious marketing routes such as getting listed by the various search engines and purchasing search engine based advertising, another popular technique is to list your products using a comparison shopping site or portal.

Comparison shopping sites aggregate products from many different online stores which allows customers to easily find the right product. Although your products are being listed along with your competitors, this technique has the advantage that your products are going to reach a very large audience of potential customers.

This large audience comes from not only the vistors to the portal site that you have subscribed to, but also from a large number of affiliate sites that are often associated with the major comparison shopping sites.

Setting up a product data feed for your products is a great way to get this added exposure for your online store by syndicating them to a variety of these shopping portals.

A product data feed is a means by which you can publish frequently updated data in a consistent data format. With product listings, that data is the product name, price, description, manufacturer, photo URLs, etc.

Since the data is in a standard format, it can be used by other sites to populate their databases of products on your behalf, automating the otherwise manual task of data entry that would be required to place your products on those sites.