In the world of e-commerce, there’s an invisible but crucial hero: the product feed. Without it, you can’t launch ads, marketplaces won’t know about your products, and partner stores won’t be able to sell them.
Simply put, a product feed is a file or data stream containing information about your products: names, prices, images, stock levels, descriptions, specifications, discounts, and even links to video reviews. Think of it as a digital catalog—but one designed not for human eyes, but for machines: ad platforms, marketplaces, and integration services.
What’s Inside a Feed and Why It Matters
The contents of a product feed can vary depending on where and why it’s used. It can include:
- Basic data — name, price, SKU, stock level, images
- Marketing data — promotions, discounts, keywords
- Technical specifications — size, weight, color, material
- Multimedia — links to images, videos, 3D models
- Service fields — category IDs, brand IDs, warehouse codes
In an ideal world, a feed is complete, up-to-date, and neatly structured—ready to be loaded into any system without extra work.
The Big Problem With Product Feeds
On paper, it all sounds simple: you have a file, you load it, and it works. In practice? Not so much.
The biggest issue is the lack of a universal standard. Google wants one format, Yandex another. Some platforms require the product name as a mandatory field, others require the barcode. One partner wants XML, another JSON, and a third uses CSV in an encoding you haven’t seen since the 1990s.
Then there are the “little things”:
- In one feed, the price field is called
price, in another it’scost. - Some list price and currency separately, others put them together (“100 USD”).
- Even if the format is the same, the data set might differ—one partner wants all specs, another only needs description and price.
As a result, each integration becomes its own mini-project with developers, testing, and endless fixes.
How to Build Feeds When Partners Are All Different
If you have one partner with clear technical requirements—it’s easy: just build the feed to spec.
In reality, you might have dozens of partners—and their requirements change over time. That’s where the challenge begins: how do you keep the feed from becoming a bottleneck for your business?
You could:
- Generate a separate feed for each partner
- Keep a dev team on standby to tweak exports for each case
- Fix errors manually when something breaks
The problem? It’s slow, expensive, and never-ending. Even big stores with strong IT teams get stuck—marketing wants to launch ads tomorrow, but integration will take two months.
Taking a Feed From a Supplier Without Getting Stuck
On the flip side, receiving a feed from a supplier brings its own surprises:
- Fields are named differently
- Data comes in unexpected formats
- The structure doesn’t match the documentation
- Required fields might be missing
To handle such a feed, you need to map the fields, validate the data, and adapt it to your system—more time, more people, more room for error.
Why You Can’t Solve This Manually
You can be the perfect partner, write clean code, and automate—but you’ll still run into format incompatibility. One company alone can’t change the market.
You need a tool that can accept any data and output it in any format—without involving a developer.
How NotPIM Solves This
Here’s how it works: you upload your data to NotPIM in any format—XML, JSON, Excel, even PDF. The system automatically detects the structure and lets you choose how you want to send it to your partner.
Inside, there are already over 2,000 preconfigured templates for popular platforms. You just pick the one you need, and it’s ready.
Got a custom format? Create your own. Need to export every single product detail? Done. Need the same feed but with only description and price? Easy.
If you’re receiving a feed, NotPIM automatically maps the fields: price becomes your “Price,” cost also becomes “Price,” and the pair “price + currency” is combined into one “100 USD” field.
AI builds a mapping schema between the source format and yours. The content stays intact—it’s just placed in the right fields. From there, automation keeps the data flowing back and forth.
The Result
- Instead of weeks of work and developer back-and-forth, you get a working feed in minutes.
- Small stores can integrate with any partner—even without an in-house tech team.
- Large companies stop wasting months on integration and launch marketing faster.
Most importantly—you stop being afraid of the word integration.