What is a product feed? The definitive guide for UK ecommerce teams

If you run an ecommerce business and advertise on Google, Meta, or any shopping channel, you're using a product feed — even if you don't know exactly what it is or how it works. Understanding product feeds is one of the highest-leverage skills for any UK ecommerce or PPC professional.

The simple definition

A product feed is a structured file containing information about your products — organised so that advertising platforms, marketplaces, comparison sites, and AI shopping assistants can read, index, and display your products to potential buyers.

Think of it like a spreadsheet of your entire catalogue, formatted specifically for each platform's requirements. The same product might need different formats for Google Shopping (XML), Meta (CSV), and ChatGPT (JSONL) — but the underlying data is the same.

What does a product feed contain?

A typical product feed contains some or all of the following:

• Identifiers: Unique product IDs, GTINs (EAN barcodes), manufacturer part numbers
• Basic data: Title, description, brand, condition
• Pricing: Current price, sale price, currency
• Availability: In stock, out of stock, preorder, backorder
• Media: Product image URLs, additional image URLs, video URLs
• Categorisation: Product type, google_product_category
• Variant data: Size, colour, material — the dimensions that vary between product variants
• Seller information: Brand URL, return policy, shipping details
• Advertising signals: Custom labels, promotional IDs, excluded destinations

Why product feed quality matters

Your product feed is not just an administrative requirement — it's a direct performance lever.

Research consistently shows that optimised product titles and descriptions increase click-through rates by an average of 30%. The UK ecommerce market hit £286 billion in 2026, and Shopping channels drive a significant portion of that — making feed quality a commercial priority, not just a technical one.

The platform that receives your feed uses it to:

• Match your products to buyer search queries (Google Shopping)
• Determine which products to show which users (Meta Dynamic Product Ads)
• Evaluate whether your product is relevant to a conversational query (ChatGPT Shopping)
• Generate ad creative automatically (TikTok Dynamic Showcase Ads)
• Compare your price against competitors (Kelkoo, Idealo)

A feed with incomplete data, incorrect prices, or poor titles underperforms on every one of these metrics simultaneously.

The main product feed formats

XML (RSS/Atom): The standard format for Google Shopping. Uses a hierarchical tag structure with the g: namespace for Google-specific attributes. Most readable for humans; most supported by feed management tools.

CSV/TSV: Comma or tab-separated values — essentially a structured spreadsheet. Used by Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, Awin, and many other channels. Simple to generate, familiar to marketing teams.

JSONL: JSON Lines format — one JSON object per line, one line per product. Used by ChatGPT Shopping. Handles nested data structures (like variant arrays) more cleanly than CSV. Less familiar to most marketers but increasingly important.

Parquet: Compressed columnar storage format preferred by OpenAI for large catalogues. Uncommon in day-to-day ecommerce but worth knowing exists.

How product feeds are delivered

There are three main delivery methods:

Scheduled fetch: You host a feed file at a stable URL; the platform fetches it on a schedule you set (daily, twice daily, hourly). This is the most common method for Google Shopping and Meta. Your feed tool generates and updates the file; the platform retrieves it automatically.

SFTP push: You push the feed file to the platform's SFTP endpoint on a schedule. Required by ChatGPT Shopping. More setup required but gives you precise control over delivery timing.

Direct upload: You manually upload a file to the platform's merchant centre. Fine for initial setup and testing, but impractical for daily operational management.

The feed management stack

Most ecommerce businesses use a feed management tool that sits between their store and their advertising channels. The tool:

1. Pulls product data from your store (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, or an XML source)
2. Applies rules to clean, enrich, and transform the data
3. Generates correctly-formatted output files for each channel
4. Delivers those files to each platform on a schedule
5. Monitors for errors and sends alerts when something goes wrong

Without a feed management tool, this process is done manually — exporting CSVs from your platform, reformatting them in Excel, uploading to each channel separately, and repeating daily. It's time-consuming, error-prone, and doesn't scale.

What makes a feed "optimised"?

A feed is optimised when it maximises the number of relevant impressions and clicks it generates on each platform. Key optimisation areas:

• Titles: Include brand, product name, and key variant attributes in the optimal order for your category. Test variations systematically.
• GTINs: Complete barcode coverage significantly improves Google Shopping match quality and impression share.
• Descriptions: Factual, specific, keyword-rich — different requirements for traditional Shopping (keywords matter) vs AI channels (factual richness matters).
• Category mapping: Correct google_product_category assignment improves category-based query matching.
• Custom labels: Segmentation data for bid management in Shopping campaigns.
• Update frequency: Current prices and availability — price mismatches are the leading cause of disapprovals and wasted spend.

Feed optimisation is not a one-time task. As your catalogue changes, as channel specifications update, and as new AI commerce channels emerge (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode), your feed needs ongoing attention to maintain performance.

The future of product feeds

The product feed is becoming more important, not less. AI commerce is fundamentally feed-driven — ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode all use structured product data feeds to power their shopping recommendations. As conversational commerce grows, the quality and completeness of your product feed directly determines your visibility across an expanding range of discovery surfaces.

UK merchants who invest in feed quality now are building an asset that compounds in value as AI commerce expands.