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Inventory feeds, also known as product data feeds, quantity on hand reports, and inventory data feeds, are any supplier or warehouse-provided data that contains inventory information. Vendor feeds are often hosted on a web or FTP server, or they are periodically emailed by vendors. In order words, the data is stored in one system and fed into another.
Why Should I Use Inventory Feeds?
There are a few important things to note when creating your first inventory feed. Let’s start with the basics.
1) What Goes Into an Inventory Feed?
Your inventory feed should include things like the quantity available and various product identifiers like the SKU, MPN, and UPC.
Sometimes information like wholesale costs, when items are projected to be back in stock, MSRP, MAP, and product images are included.
2) What format should be used?
We suggest using easy, universally acceptable formats like CSV and Excel files for your inventory feeds. While you can get more complicated with it, the lowest common denominator format is the most recognized and easy-to-use across all retailers.
Alternatively, some vendors choose XML or JSON formats to provide richer data. These formats, along with EDI, are harder for your retailers to consume.
3) How do I Provide Inventory Feeds to my Retailers?
To keep things simple, many vendors opt to email vendor feeds on a regular basis. Alternatively, vendors can host the data on a web page or FTP or SFTP server.
A less common option is to provide your retailers with an API. This, however, does require the retailer to write an API integration, so we do not recommend the extra hassle.
Overall, inventory feeds are essential, so we suggest finding the most efficient way possible to manage them.
Automating your inventory feeds allows you to spend more time focusing on the more complex parts of your business. With a dropship automation system like Duoplane, you can simply import your feeds and the system will automatically provide them to your retailers in your preferred format. In other words, Duoplane is able to take most inventory feeds as-is, map the data properly, and update your product catalogue with new information.
A system like Duoplane is the most efficient way to manage your inventory feeds because Duoplane can consume data in almost any format and can sync this data to your retailer’s shopping cart in real-time.
If you’re interested in optimizing your dropship operations and inventory feeds, learn more on duoplane.com or contact us at support@duoplane.com.
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