Datafeed is one of the ways of data exchange for e-commerce, webstores, advertisers, affiliates, and marketplaces. A datafeed in this context can be seen as a file that contains structured information about one or multiple products.
Datafeeds are often called affiliate product feeds since they contain multiple products for further promotion by affiliates.
We should not confuse Datafeeds and RSS feeds or content feeds, despite the fact that they serve the same purpose - deliver content. They differ in file structure and methods of delivering content.
RSS feed delivers up-to-date information using XML format for its files.
Datafeeds deliver the actual at the moment of the file creation information and usually use CSV (comma-separated values) format.
A Comma Separated Values (CSV) file is a file in plain text which contains multiple data values separated by a comma.
Such files are used for data exchange between two systems or applications and are not used for preview by a person. However, you can use special software to preview CSV files, for example, Microsoft Excel.
Excel arranges datafeed information in tables, with columns and rows. In product datafeed each row contains specific information about a product, like its name, URL to the sales page, product description, product image and so on.
The structure of the table can be rather complicated and the size of the file can be pretty big. So this is still not a very convenient way to read the information for an end user.
To process datafeed files you can use Datafeed converter from RSS Ground. It will help you to preview, filter and edit your datafeed information, find and replace any values, extract needed data. The most remarkable part is that Datafeed converter provides you with an RSS feed with your processed information.
These RSS feeds can be easily previewed in any Feeds Reader or even in most web browsers. They are standard RSS feeds and can be also used in RSS Ground automated feeds posters.
Read more about Datafeed converter.