The trend towards connected commerce is accelerating, with some reports predicting that 80% of ALL sales will take place on marketplaces by 2030. Marketplaces and social commerce present brands and retailers with a significant opportunity to extend their reach and grow their turnover, but also some serious technical challenges:

• How should merchants manage inventory across technically diverse third-party environments?

• How are orders synchronised across multiple platforms?

• How can brands and retailers curate the right products for each channel and optimise them for peak performance?

Exporting data the traditional way

Offsite product discovery has become vital to e-commerce success, driving new customers and revenue. Traditionally, retailers and brands built custom export feeds specifically for this purpose, often pulling together sources of data from an internal commerce stack.

These exports have, potentially, millions of product rows that need to be constantly updated. On some third-party channels, stock and price information needs to be updated as regularly as every 15mins.

Much of this data is not actually changing between updates, so merchants are paying a high cost in time, money, and opportunity updating products unnecessarily. Some merchants are building full sets of data up to four times a day for over 50 countries, amounting to daily changes to tens of millions of products.

Harnessing the power of the cloud

At Intelligent Reach, we are constantly developing more efficient ways to build large data sets at scale. We have been in the cloud for more than nine years now, testing out the realities of auto-scaling infrastructure, API first micro service driven integrations and parallelisation (building smaller data sets concurrently).

In June, 2024, we launched two upgrades which bring us ever closer to real-time updating of product data:

Our latest feed-building infrastructure, Feedbuilder 4 can build about 250k products per 7mins, which represents a reduction for larger and complex data sets of up to 80% on our previous infrastructure.

Customers who connect with our Product & Inventory APIs can go one step further and leverage seamless data transfer and come close to near real-time updates for their product data.

In order to ensure optimal feed building, there are many things that drive efficiencies.

Separate products from stock and price data – Stock and prices is what we call inventory data. It changes much more often than product data and ideally needs to be managed in near real time. Feedbuilder 4 makes this possible, especially if data is pushed via our product import API. When we use one of our platform connectors, such as our Shopify connector, we pull this data every 15mins and update it very quickly to e-commerce channels.

Product data – Product data is not likely to change more than once per day. Build this data after your main update has run on your internal systems, quite early in the morning.

Build deltas only – Update only the data that has actually changed. Even if our customers can’t send us deltas, we will automatically check and import only change date to increase the efficiency of your build process.

Push data via APIs if available – Pushing data to partners is also done in the most efficient way, depending on the capabilities of the receiving partner. The big platforms like Google, Meta, the marketplaces etc, all have sophisticated APIs which allow us to push deltas and get messages back if there are any errors.

What does this all mean for you?

• Robust scalable infrastructure
• Only products that are new or modified get rebuilt
• Feed build times are reduced by up to 80%
• Efficient source data import
• Faster optimisations to your product listings
• Build feeds almost instantly with every update, only importing new or modified data​
• Upgrade to Google Content API Partner Feed Feed product, online inventory, LIA & RAAP* updates)​
• Remove GMC fetch schedule limitations​