Automatic Product Feeds | Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast

Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast

There are serious problems with automated product feeds that nobody seems to want to tell you. So I'll tell you, because I don't want you to have serious problems with your online business!

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

When you have a website that sells products online, sometimes you come across automated product feeds from drop shippers and other wholesalers.

This means that your supplier automatically loads your website with products, descriptions, prices, quantity available and so forth.

These automated product feeds are updated on a regular basis so that you don't have to manually add products, manage prices and descriptions, and so on.

For people who are new to online business, this looks like the Holy Grail of easy product management. But there are serious problems with automatic product feeds that nobody seems to want to tell you.

So I'll tell you, because I don't want you to have serious problems with your online business.

The first problem is that people tend to take the entire product feed and put it on their website. That often means hundreds, or even thousands of products on a single site.

It also means products on that site will be unrelated to each other. For example, a drop shipping slash wholesale product feed might carry everything from sporting goods to jewelry, from clocks to baby buggies. That's really bad.

Why is that bad?

Because a website that has more than one specific product line on it, is next to impossible to get ranked in Google, which is the most important search engine online.

These days search engines look for websites that tell one story about one thing. If you're going to sell baby buggies, you need to sell only baby buggies on your site.

If you're going to sell sporting goods, pick one type of sporting goods product, baseball bats for example, and sell only that.

If you mix products that a search engine sees as unrelated to each other, you have completely unrelated keywords on that site, and you just confuse the search engines.

When that happens, nobody will ever find your site. If nobody finds your site, no sales.

The second problem is that automated product feeds give you the product descriptions along with all the other info they put on your site. Now, that might seem like a good thing.

But for your SEO, (your search engine optimization), it's actually a bad thing.

Wholesalers' descriptions of products are almost always short and factual. For good SEO and for good sales conversions, your product descriptions need to be much more personalized.

They need to be written specifically for the consumers of that product. They need to contain the right SEO keywords for that product and page, and give people that warm fuzzy that matches the overall look and personality of your site.

When you take the descriptions directly from the automated product feeds, and don't rewrite them to do all those things, you lose a very important part of your SEO.

That means you lose a very important part of your sales conversion, which is turning visitors into buyers.

So let's say you make the mistake of using an automated product feed. And you do rewrite your descriptions to be more SEO and conversion friendly.

In a week or so, that product feed is going to update. When it does, it's going to reset all your product descriptions back to the original text. In other words, it'll wipe out all your changes.

And then you'll have to do it all over again.

And then, in another week or so when the feed updates again... well, you get the picture.

For these reasons, there is simply no good way to use an automated product feed of any kind, not for a small online business.

The big box stores use them all the time. Because the big box stores don't need to personalize their product descriptions and rely on SEO.

They rely on the power of their real world advertising and name brands to bring in traffic. And as a small business owner, you can't spend millions of dollars on real world advertising.

You need every advantage you can get in the search engines. That means your product descriptions become a huge part of your marketing.

Automated product feeds will kill your search engine ranking all day long.

Most of the time, the things that seem the easiest in this business turn out to be the worst things you can do. And automated product feeds are simply a prime example.

Learn a LOT more about the real world of ECommerce. Check out my Free EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com.

Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.