Pricing Intelligence

What is Product Feed Management?

Pricing Intelligence

In the ever-growing world of eCommerce, it's crucial to stay ahead of the competition and ensure your products are easily discoverable by potential customers. 

One way to do this is through effective Product Feed Management. In this comprehensive guide, we'll explore what product feed management entails, its importance for online businesses, and best practices to optimize your product feeds.

What does Product Feed Management mean? 

Product Feed Management is the process of organizing, optimizing, and distributing product data to various online channels such as marketplaces, search engines, and comparison shopping engines. A product feed, also known as a data feed or product catalog, is a file that contains essential information about your products, including product titles, descriptions, images, prices, and more.

Effective product feed management involves continuously updating and optimizing this data to ensure it is accurate, consistent, and meets the requirements of each marketplace you sell on. By doing so, you can improve the visibility and discoverability of your products on the digital shelf, leading to increased sales and better return on investment (ROI).

The Importance of Product Feed Management for eCommerce

Product feed management is essential for eCommerce businesses for several reasons:

- Properly optimized product feeds help your products rank higher in search results, making it easier for potential customers to find them.

- Regularly updating product feeds ensures that customers have the most up-to-date information, reducing the likelihood of returns or customer dissatisfaction.

- Each online marketplace has its unique set of requirements for product feeds. Effective product feed management ensures your feeds comply with these requirements, allowing you to reach a wider audience.

The Different Types of Product Feeds

There are several types of product feeds, each catering to a different online channel:

Marketplace Feeds: These feeds are for platforms like Amazon, eBay, and Walmart, where you list your products for sale.

Shopping Comparison Feeds: Feeds for comparison shopping engines like Google Shopping, Bing Shopping, and Shopzilla allow customers to compare products and prices across multiple retailers.

Affiliate Network Feeds: These feeds cater to affiliate marketing networks like Commission Junction, ShareASale, and Rakuten, where affiliates promote your products in exchange for a commission.

Social Media Feeds: Social media platforms like Facebook and Pinterest also support product feeds, allowing businesses to showcase their products through social commerce.

Key Components of an Effective Product Feed

An effective product feed should include the following components:

  1. Unique Product Identifiers: These include SKU, GTIN, UPC, EAN, or ISBN codes, which help distinguish your products from others in the market.
  2. Descriptive Product Titles: Product titles should be clear, concise, and include relevant keywords that accurately describe the product.
  3. Enriched Product Categories: Every marketplace takes a different approach, but make sure to include key descriptors like size, color, department, and type. 
  4. Detailed Product Descriptions: Product descriptions should provide valuable information to potential buyers, highlighting key features and benefits.
  5. High-Quality Images: Product images should be high-resolution and showcase the product from different angles.
  6. Accurate Pricing and Availability Information: Ensure that your product feed reflects the most up-to-date, competitive pricing and stock information.

How Invisible can help

Invisible manages product feeds at scale with a blend of automation technology and seasoned operators. For a major eCommerce player, we boosted search engine visibility across thousands of unique SKUs by 49%, leading to $900k in new revenue on dead stock in just 16 days – 10xing the client’s investment.

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Andrew Hull

In the ever-growing world of eCommerce, it's crucial to stay ahead of the competition and ensure your products are easily discoverable by potential customers. 

One way to do this is through effective Product Feed Management. In this comprehensive guide, we'll explore what product feed management entails, its importance for online businesses, and best practices to optimize your product feeds.

What does Product Feed Management mean? 

Product Feed Management is the process of organizing, optimizing, and distributing product data to various online channels such as marketplaces, search engines, and comparison shopping engines. A product feed, also known as a data feed or product catalog, is a file that contains essential information about your products, including product titles, descriptions, images, prices, and more.

Effective product feed management involves continuously updating and optimizing this data to ensure it is accurate, consistent, and meets the requirements of each marketplace you sell on. By doing so, you can improve the visibility and discoverability of your products on the digital shelf, leading to increased sales and better return on investment (ROI).

The Importance of Product Feed Management for eCommerce

Product feed management is essential for eCommerce businesses for several reasons:

- Properly optimized product feeds help your products rank higher in search results, making it easier for potential customers to find them.

- Regularly updating product feeds ensures that customers have the most up-to-date information, reducing the likelihood of returns or customer dissatisfaction.

- Each online marketplace has its unique set of requirements for product feeds. Effective product feed management ensures your feeds comply with these requirements, allowing you to reach a wider audience.

The Different Types of Product Feeds

There are several types of product feeds, each catering to a different online channel:

Marketplace Feeds: These feeds are for platforms like Amazon, eBay, and Walmart, where you list your products for sale.

Shopping Comparison Feeds: Feeds for comparison shopping engines like Google Shopping, Bing Shopping, and Shopzilla allow customers to compare products and prices across multiple retailers.

Affiliate Network Feeds: These feeds cater to affiliate marketing networks like Commission Junction, ShareASale, and Rakuten, where affiliates promote your products in exchange for a commission.

Social Media Feeds: Social media platforms like Facebook and Pinterest also support product feeds, allowing businesses to showcase their products through social commerce.

Key Components of an Effective Product Feed

An effective product feed should include the following components:

  1. Unique Product Identifiers: These include SKU, GTIN, UPC, EAN, or ISBN codes, which help distinguish your products from others in the market.
  2. Descriptive Product Titles: Product titles should be clear, concise, and include relevant keywords that accurately describe the product.
  3. Enriched Product Categories: Every marketplace takes a different approach, but make sure to include key descriptors like size, color, department, and type. 
  4. Detailed Product Descriptions: Product descriptions should provide valuable information to potential buyers, highlighting key features and benefits.
  5. High-Quality Images: Product images should be high-resolution and showcase the product from different angles.
  6. Accurate Pricing and Availability Information: Ensure that your product feed reflects the most up-to-date, competitive pricing and stock information.

How Invisible can help

Invisible manages product feeds at scale with a blend of automation technology and seasoned operators. For a major eCommerce player, we boosted search engine visibility across thousands of unique SKUs by 49%, leading to $900k in new revenue on dead stock in just 16 days – 10xing the client’s investment.

Overview

LLM Task

Benchmark Dataset/Corpus

Sentiment Analysis

SST-1/SST-2

Natural Language Inference /  Recognizing Textual Entailment

Stanford Natural Language Inference Corpus (SNLI)

Named Entity Recognition

conll-2003

Question Answering

SQuAD

Machine Translation

WMT

Text Summarization

CNN/Daily Mail Dataset

Text Generation

WikiText

Paraphrasing

MRPC

Language Modelling

Penn Tree Bank

Bias Detection

StereoSet

LLM Task

Benchmark Dataset/Corpus

Common Metric

Dataset available at

Sentiment Analysis

SST-1/SST-2

Accuracy

https://huggingface
.co/datasets/sst2

Natural Language Inference /  Recognizing Textual Entailment

Stanford Natural Language Inference Corpus (SNLI)

Accuracy

https://nlp.stanford.edu
projects/snli/

Named Entity Recognition

conll-2003

F1 Score

https://huggingface.co/
datasets/conll2003

Question Answering

SQuAD

F1 Score, Exact Match, ROUGE

https://rajpurkar.github.i
o/SQuAD-explorer/

Machine Translation

WMT

BLEU, METEOR

https://machinetranslate
.org/wmt

Text Summarization

CNN/Daily Mail Dataset

ROUGE

https://www.tensorflow
.org/datasets/catalog/
cnn_dailymail

Text Generation

WikiText

BLEU, ROUGE

https://www.salesforce.
com/products/einstein/
ai-research/the-wikitext-dependency-language-modeling-dataset/

Paraphrasing

MRPC

ROUGE, BLEU

https://www.microsoft.
com/en-us/download/details.a
spx?id=52398

Language Modelling

Penn Tree Bank

Perplexity

https://zenodo.org/recor
d/3910021#.ZB3qdHbP
23A

Bias Detection

StereoSet

Bias Score, Differential Performance

https://huggingface.co/
datasets/stereoset

Table 1 - Example of some LLM tasks with common benchmark datasets and their respective metrics. Please note for many of these tasks, there are multiple benchmark datasets, some of which have not been mentioned here.

Metric Selection

Metric

Usage

Accuracy

Measures the proportion of correct predictions made by the model compared to the total number of predictions.

Precision

Measures the proportion of true positives out of all positive predictions.

Recall

Measures the proportion of true positives out of all actual positive instances.

F1 Score

Measures the harmonic mean of precision and recall.

Perplexity

Measures the model's uncertainty in predicting the next token (common in text generation tasks).

BLEU

Measures the similarity between machine-generated text and reference text.

ROUGE

Measures the similarity between machine-generated and human-generated text.

METEOR

May have higher computational complexity compared to BLEU or ROUGE.Requires linguistic resources for matching, which may not be available for all languages.

Pros

Cons

Simple interpretability. Provides an overall measure of model performance.

Sensitive to dataset imbalances, which can make it not informative. Does not take into account false positives and false negatives.

Useful when the cost of false positives is high. Measures the accuracy of positive predictions.

Does not take into account false negatives.Depends on other metrics to be informative (cannot be used alone).Sensitive to dataset imbalances.

Useful when the cost of false negatives is high.

Does not take into account false negatives.Depends on other metrics to be informative (cannot be used alone)and Sensitive to dataset imbalances.

Robust to imbalanced datasets.

Assumes equal importance of precision and recall.May not be suitable for multi-class classification problems with different class distributions.

Interpretable as it provides a single value for model performance.

May not directly correlate with human judgment.

Correlates well with human judgment.Easily interpretable for measuring translation quality.

Does not directly explain the performance on certain tasks (but correlates with human judgment).Lacks sensitivity to word order and semantic meaning.

Has multiple variants to capture different aspects of similarity.

May not capture semantic similarity beyond n-grams or LCS.Limited to measuring surface-level overlap.

Addresses some limitations of BLEU, such as recall and synonyms.

May have higher computational complexity compared to BLEU or ROUGE.Requires linguistic resources for matching, which may not be available for all languages.

Metric

Usage

Pros

Cons

Accuracy

Measures the proportion of correct predictions made by the model compared to the total number of predictions.

Simple interpretability. Provides an overall measure of model performance.

Sensitive to dataset imbalances, which can make it not informative. Does not take into account false positives and false negatives.

Precision

Measures the proportion of true positives out of all positive predictions.

Useful when the cost of false positives is high. Measures the accuracy of positive predictions.

Does not take into account false negatives.Depends on other metrics to be informative (cannot be used alone).Sensitive to dataset imbalances.

Recall

Measures the proportion of true positives out of all actual positive instances.

Useful when the cost of false negatives is high.

Does not take into account false negatives.Depends on other metrics to be informative (cannot be used alone)and Sensitive to dataset imbalances.

F1 Score

Measures the harmonic mean of precision and recall.

Robust to imbalanced datasets.

Assumes equal importance of precision and recall.May not be suitable for multi-class classification problems with different class distributions.

Perplexity

Measures the model's uncertainty in predicting the next token (common in text generation tasks).

Interpretable as it provides a single value for model performance.

May not directly correlate with human judgment.

BLEU

Measures the similarity between machine-generated text and reference text.

Correlates well with human judgment.Easily interpretable for measuring translation quality.

Does not directly explain the performance on certain tasks (but correlates with human judgment).Lacks sensitivity to word order and semantic meaning.

ROUGE

Measures the similarity between machine-generated and human-generated text.

Has multiple variants to capture different aspects of similarity.

May not capture semantic similarity beyond n-grams or LCS.Limited to measuring surface-level overlap.

METEOR

Measures the similarity between machine-generated translations and reference translations.

Addresses some limitations of BLEU, such as recall and synonyms.

May have higher computational complexity compared to BLEU or ROUGE.Requires linguistic resources for matching, which may not be available for all languages.

Table 2 - Common LLM metrics, their usage as a measurement tool, and their pros and cons. Note that for some of these metrics there exist different versions. For example, some of the versions of ROUGE include ROUGE-N, ROUGE-L, and ROUGE-W. For context, ROUGE-N measures the overlap of sequences of n-length-words between the text reference and the model-generated text. ROUGE-L measures the overlap between the longest common subsequence of tokens in the reference text and generated text, regardless of order. ROUGE-W on the other hand, assigns weights (relative importances) to longer common sub-sequences of common tokens (similar to ROUGE-L but with added weights). A combination of the most relevant variants of a metric, like ROUGE is selected for comprehensive evaluation.

Andrew Hull

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