As a small business, you need to work with what is available. For feeds, excel works well for a handful of products, but as inventory scales then so does the maintenance of keeping all your products in an excel sheet.
You could be like this guy who took on the challenge of scrolling through every row in excel till he reached the bottom.
“Guy Spends Nine Hours Manually Scrolling To Find The Bottom Of An Excel Spreadsheet”
Now that you’ve seen that, imagine if Excel was populated with thousands of products. To go through all those products and checking on the quality of the data would be daunting. Let alone take up way too much precious time that could be put to other revenue generating initiatives. We’re not even talking about changes to optimize the feed yet or what happens when you need to update prices and quantities.
There are limitations to Excel when using it as your go to for creating product feeds. The biggest being limited by available memory, system resources, and the total amount of product data that can be stored.
This is why many ecommerce companies look to feed management systems. Not only does a feed management software help with cleaning up large amounts of data, but great software improves the feeds performance by optimizing to best practices for advertising channels such as Google Shopping and Bing Shopping.
If your business is still using excel for data feeds, or is set for growth this 2017, give your feed based marketing the best opportunity for success by looking into feed management software. We hope you’d contact us in your search for optimized feed management.
Brian Roizen is the Cofounder and Chief Architect of Feedonomics, a full-service feed optimization platform that optimizes product data for hundreds of channels. He has been featured on numerous podcasts and eCommerce webinars, and regularly contributes to Search Engine Land and other industry-leading blogs. Brian graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering.
