feedcommerce for merchants
What type of retailers want to create feeds? It turns out a variety of commercial 'product' data is suitable for distribution via feeds:
- Physical products - online stores can expose their entire itinerary of products via feeds
- Events - event promoters can publish feeds that contain entries for events that they are promoting
- Contacts - social networks can publish feeds that contain members public contact details
- Travel - airlines, hotels and agents can publish feeds of travel/accommodation deals
- Reviews - online review sites can publish feeds of all their product reviews
Location-based listings
Additional location-based listings/offers, particularly applicable to Internet-connected mobile phones are a highly promising market segment right now. If you are walking through your local shopping mall you might want to be contacted on your mobile phone with special offers from shops you frequent as you approach them. feedcommerce gives consumers the control - they can pre-subscribe to feeds on their home PC and their mobile device receives the same content.
Presenting your feeds
How many feeds should retailers create? It depends on how they want to present their product data. For example a feed could be a specialised list of offers and deals, such as a travel agency feed containing flight specials. A feed could equally contain the retailer's entire product catalogue.
Tracking your feeds
Retailer will of course want to be able to track activity on their product feeds and see how they are being distributed and how the market is receiving their products. feedcommerce platforms, which we will discuss below, facilitate this and also allow retailers to engage with publishers (and consumers!) in revenue sharing arrangements to further promote products through new channels using a variety of revenue models.
Of course creating feeds is just a means to an end. The standard feed format allow publishers (or the retailer themselves!) to easily develop and distribute widgets throughout the internet.