Product feed
A product feed is a structured, machine-readable file or data stream — typically formatted as CSV, XML, or JSON — that transmits product attributes, pricing, and availability from a source system to a downstream channel such as a marketplace, distributor portal, search engine, or procurement platform. In B2B commerce, the completeness and accuracy of that feed directly determines whether a buyer can find, evaluate, and purchase a product without calling a sales rep.
What a product feed contains — and why it varies so much
At minimum, a product feed carries a product identifier (SKU or GTIN), a title, a short description, a price, and stock status. In practice, B2B feeds are far more complex. A single electrical component feed might include voltage ratings, wire gauge compatibility, UL listing numbers, agency approvals, country of origin, lead time, minimum order quantity, unit of measure, and a half-dozen application notes.
The format depends on the destination channel. Google Merchant Center requires XML or TSV with tightly specified attribute names. Amazon Vendor Central uses flat-file spreadsheets with category-specific templates. A regional distributor's ERP might accept only a pipe-delimited flat file structured around their internal part-number schema. An eProcurement platform like Coupa or Ariba typically wants a cXML catalog or a PunchOut-compliant feed. This means a single product can require five structurally different feeds without changing a single fact about the product itself — just the packaging.
Source systems differ too. Some manufacturers generate feeds from a PIM (Product Information Management system) like Akeneo or Salsify, which can output structured data on demand. Others export directly from an ERP like SAP or Oracle, pulling whatever fields happen to be populated. The gap between those two approaches shows up immediately in feed quality: ERP exports tend to carry transactional data well (price, inventory, lead time) and marketing or specification data poorly.
How a product feed moves through the B2B stack
A feed typically originates from a source of truth — a PIM, ERP, or product database — and travels through one or more transformation steps before reaching its destination. That journey looks roughly like this:
- Extract: A scheduled job, webhook, or API call pulls product records from the source system, usually as a full catalog refresh or an incremental delta of changed records.
- Transform: Field names are mapped to the destination's schema, units are converted, HTML is stripped or added, images are resized or re-hosted, and category taxonomies are crosswalked.
- Validate: Required fields are checked for presence, values are screened against allowed lists (e.g., accepted condition codes), and records that fail validation are flagged or dropped.
- Deliver: The finished file lands at a destination — an SFTP folder, a marketplace API endpoint, a distributor's FTP server, or a content syndication platform like Syndigo or Salsify Connect.
Feed frequency matters enormously in B2B. A daily overnight batch was acceptable when most B2B purchasing happened offline. Today, buyers checking stock availability or comparing specifications in real time expect near-live data. A product that shows as available in a feed but is actually backordered creates a failed order, a customer service call, and occasionally a lost account relationship.
For large catalogs — hundreds of thousands to millions of SKUs — full-catalog refreshes are prohibitively slow. Delta feeds, which transmit only records changed since the last run, require the source system to reliably track change timestamps. Many legacy ERPs do not.
Where B2B product feeds break — and what it costs
Most feed failures are not technical failures. The file transfers. The schema validates. The products appear in the destination channel. The problem is that the content is insufficient to convert a buyer.
Truncated titles. A B2B buyer searching for a 316 stainless steel ball valve with a 1-inch NPT port and a pneumatic actuator needs that specificity in the title. A feed that delivers "Ball Valve SS 1 in" forces the buyer to click through to verify — if the listing even surfaces in search at all.
Missing attributes. Marketplace and distributor portals increasingly score listings by attribute completeness and demote incomplete ones in search. A product missing its hazardous material classification, its operating temperature range, or its compatibility certifications may rank below a competitor's inferior product that simply filled in more fields.
Supplier copy pasted verbatim. Manufacturer descriptions are written to describe what the product is, not to match how buyers search for it. Buyers use application language ("conveyor belt tension pulley"), not catalog language ("Type 3B idler assembly"). A feed that passes through supplier copy unchanged without layering in buyer vocabulary will miss a significant share of search traffic.
Stale data. Price changes, product discontinuations, and supersession records that do not propagate quickly to downstream feeds create order errors and buyer distrust. In B2B, where buyers often check pricing across multiple distributors simultaneously, a stale price that is then corrected at checkout damages the relationship.
Image deficiencies. A 72-dpi thumbnail acceptable for print catalogs will be rejected by marketplace image validators or render poorly next to a competitor's 2000px white-background product shot with multiple angles.
The difference between reformatting and enriching
A common misconception is that building a product feed is a data transformation problem — get the right fields into the right format and the work is done. For simple retail SKUs, that may be enough. For B2B catalogs with deep technical specifications, it misses most of the value.
Consider a distributor selling industrial sensors. The manufacturer's feed includes a product title, a part number, a PDF datasheet link, and a price. The downstream channel — say, a digital marketplace for MRO buyers — expects operating temperature range, output signal type, connection type, IP rating, and three application keywords. None of those fields exist in the manufacturer's feed. Reformatting cannot create them.
This is where enrichment that reads buyer signals changes the outcome. Buyer signals are the search queries, comparison criteria, filter selections, and purchase patterns that reveal what attributes actually drive purchase decisions in a given category. When a sensor distributor knows that 34% of sensor searches include "4-20mA output" and 28% filter by IP67 rating, those attributes become mandatory — not nice-to-have — for every product in that category, regardless of what the manufacturer's feed provides.
Anglera approaches feeds from this direction: rather than reformatting what the supplier sent, it identifies which attributes buyers actually use to evaluate products in each category, extracts or infers those attributes from available sources (datasheets, supplier pages, category norms), and writes structured values back to the PIM before the feed is generated. The downstream feed is then built from enriched records, not raw manufacturer exports. The distinction matters because a feed built from enriched data performs in search, converts at a higher rate, and requires fewer buyer-support touchpoints — which in B2B translates directly to lower cost-to-serve.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a product feed and a product catalog?
A product catalog is a curated, human-readable representation of a company's product line — typically organized for browsing. A product feed is a machine-readable data file designed for automated ingestion by a specific downstream system. The catalog is the concept; the feed is the technical delivery mechanism. Most B2B companies maintain one catalog but generate multiple feeds, each formatted to the schema requirements of a different channel.
What file formats are most common for B2B product feeds?
CSV and tab-delimited flat files are the most common for distributor and ERP integrations because they require no specialized parsing. XML is standard for marketplaces and eProcurement platforms, particularly in BMEcat (common in Europe) and cXML formats. JSON is increasingly used for API-based feed delivery to modern commerce platforms. The right format depends entirely on the destination system's requirements, not the source system's preferences.
How often should a B2B product feed be updated?
It depends on what is changing. Pricing and inventory should ideally update in near-real time or at least multiple times per day, since stale availability data causes failed orders. Product content — descriptions, specifications, images — changes less frequently and a daily or weekly refresh is usually sufficient. Treating all feed data as one monolithic batch job is a common mistake: price and spec data have very different volatility profiles.
What causes a product feed to be rejected by a marketplace or distributor?
The most common causes are missing required attributes (every channel has a minimum set), values that fall outside allowed enumerations (e.g., submitting 'EACH' when the platform expects 'EA'), image URLs that return errors or fail resolution requirements, title or description fields that exceed character limits, and GTIN or UPC values that fail check-digit validation. Most platforms return an error log identifying which records failed and why — the harder problem is feeds that pass validation but still perform poorly because the content is thin.
Is a PIM system required to manage product feeds at scale?
Not required, but effectively necessary above a few thousand SKUs. Without a central content repository, feed generation typically involves manual spreadsheet work, version conflicts between channels, and no reliable way to push a content update to all downstream feeds simultaneously. A PIM provides the source-of-truth layer that makes multi-channel feed management tractable. The feed itself is a downstream output; the PIM is where feed quality is actually determined.