Google Shopping, Microsoft, Pinterest, Snapchat, Meta. Five channels, five sets of instructions, and underneath all of them exactly the same thing: a product feed.
Learn what a feed is and which fields matter, once, and every channel afterwards is a variation rather than a fresh puzzle. It is genuinely the highest-leverage hour you can spend on selling through channels.
What a feed is
A product feed is a list of everything you sell, written so a machine can read it. Not a web page, which is written for people and full of layout, but a structured file where every product has the same labelled pieces of information in the same places.
The clearest way to picture it is a spreadsheet. Each row is a product. Each column is a piece of information: name, price, link, picture, in stock or not. Channels read the columns they care about.
The reason it exists is that a shopping channel cannot reliably work out from a web page whether £24.99 is the price, the was-price or the price of a related item. Given a feed, it does not have to guess.
The fields that carry the weight
Title. The most important field by a distance, because it is the main thing matched against what people search for. Not the artful name you gave the product, but a description someone would actually type. This deserves its own attention, and it has it in how to write product titles for shopping feeds.
Price and availability. These must match your live product page. A mismatch is the most common reason products get rejected anywhere, and it happens almost entirely because someone uploaded a file and then changed prices on the site. For the UK, prices must include VAT.
Image link. The main photo, on a plain background, with no watermark, no promotional text and no borders. Note that Google has set a minimum of 500 by 500 pixels effective 31 January 2027, which is worth auditing your catalogue against now rather than in January.
Link. The product's own page on your own verified domain, not your homepage and not a category page.
Description. Read for context and matching. It should agree with the page.
The three identifiers, explained properly
This is where people get stuck, and it is simpler than it looks. Channels want to know which product in the world yours is, so they can group it with the same item sold elsewhere and show it in the right comparisons.
GTIN is the barcode. Global Trade Item Number, which is the formal name for the number under the barcode on a retail product. It comes in 8, 12, 13 or 14 digits, and it is assigned by whoever manufactured the product. If you resell other people's products, they have GTINs, and you should be sending them.
MPN is the manufacturer's part number. The code the maker uses for that specific item. You send this when a product genuinely has no barcode.
Brand is who makes it. If you make it yourself, your own business name is the brand. This one is required for essentially all new products, and it catches out makers who have never thought of themselves as a brand.
The rule in practice: if the product has a real manufacturer barcode, send GTIN and brand. If it genuinely does not, because you make it, send brand and MPN.
Why missing barcodes cost you visibility
Strictly, GTINs are not universally required. In practice, free-listing visibility drops sharply without them, because the channel cannot confidently match your product to the thing people are searching for.
If you resell branded products and are not sending barcodes, that is one of the largest and most fixable losses in your setup. The numbers exist. They are on the boxes.
And a warning that matters more than it sounds: never guess or borrow a barcode. A valid barcode belonging to a different product does not fail quietly. It maps your item onto someone else's catalogue entry, which gets it rejected as an incorrect identifier and can look like you are misrepresenting what you sell. No barcode is much better than a wrong one.
Two mechanical traps produce most invalid barcodes. Spreadsheets eat leading zeros, so 0123456789012 silently becomes 123456789012, which is no longer a valid length. And internal SKUs get typed into the barcode field, which is not what that field is for. Both are worth checking before you upload, because Google will not tell you a barcode is wrong until the product has already been rejected.
How the feed gets to the channel
Four ways, and the choice matters more than people expect.
- Upload a file by hand. Fine once, terrible as a system, because the moment you change a price on your site the file is wrong.
- A shared spreadsheet. Slightly better, still manual, still goes stale.
- Scheduled fetch. You publish the feed at a web address and the channel collects it on a schedule. This is the right answer for almost every small shop.
- A direct connection. Real-time updates. Powerful, needs development.
Scheduled fetch matters because it removes the whole category of mismatch errors. Your feed regenerates from live product data, the channel collects it daily, and your prices cannot disagree with your site for longer than a day.
One catalogue, five channels
The practical realisation: you do not need five feeds maintained separately. You need one accurate product catalogue that generates a feed per channel in whatever shape that channel wants.
That is why fixing your product data pays off five times over. A barcode added once improves Google, Microsoft, Pinterest, Snapchat and Meta together. A title rewritten once is a better title everywhere.
On most platforms each channel is a separate paid app, which is the real reason small shops end up on Google only. On Orbit the feed plugins are free on every plan, all reading the same catalogue.
Questions people ask about product feeds
What is a product feed in ecommerce?
A machine-readable list of everything you sell, with each product's information in labelled fields: title, description, price, availability, image and link. Think of it as a spreadsheet where every row is a product. Shopping channels such as Google, Microsoft, Pinterest, Snapchat and Meta all read one, which is how your products appear with the correct price and stock status rather than the channel having to guess from your web page.
What is the difference between GTIN, MPN and brand?
GTIN is the barcode number assigned by the manufacturer, 8, 12, 13 or 14 digits. MPN is the manufacturer's own part number, used when a product has no barcode. Brand is who makes it, and if you make it yourself that is your own business name. In practice: send GTIN and brand if the product has a real barcode, and brand and MPN if it genuinely does not.
What happens if I use the wrong barcode on a product?
It fails worse than having none. A valid barcode belonging to a different product maps your item onto someone else's catalogue entry, which gets it rejected as an incorrect identifier and can look like misrepresentation. Never guess or copy one from a similar item. Two mechanical causes account for most invalid barcodes: spreadsheets stripping leading zeros, and internal SKUs typed into the barcode field.
Do I need a different product feed for each channel?
You need a feed per channel, but not a separate catalogue per channel, and that distinction is the whole point. One accurate set of product data generates all of them. A barcode added once improves every channel at the same time, and a better title is a better title everywhere. Some channels are also directly compatible: Microsoft accepts Google's format as it stands.
The short version
A feed is your catalogue written for machines. Titles matter most, price and availability must match your live page, and prices include VAT in the UK. Send real barcodes where they exist and never invent one, because a wrong barcode is worse than none. Use scheduled fetch so the feed cannot go stale. And fix the product data once, because every channel reads the same catalogue.