What is a Data Feed?

A data feed is an ongoing stream of structured product data that provides shoppers with current product information.

Shopping search engines are paid programs that use your current product data in search results and ads.  Feed systems can be manual or automated.  For manual feeds, you upload current product data to your shopping search engine's (or marketplace) merchant account.  There are also automated systems that can retrieve your current product data once triggered (by publishing your store, for example) and send the properly formatted data automatically to your merchant account to be used in search results and ads.