Shopping feed
A shopping feed is a product feed formatted specifically for a shopping or advertising channel, containing exactly the attributes and values that channel requires to list and advertise your products.
Where 'product feed' is the general concept, a shopping feed is the channel-specific version: a Google Shopping feed, a Meta catalog feed, a TikTok feed, and so on. Each one follows that channel's spec for required fields, accepted values, file format, and naming conventions.
It matters because the same underlying product data has to be reshaped per channel. Google might require google_product_category, Meta uses its own taxonomy and field names, and required-versus-optional attributes differ across all of them. A feed that is perfect for one channel can be rejected by another.
In practice, building a shopping feed means more than exporting your catalog: it means mapping your fields to the channel's expected attributes, converting values to accepted formats, and validating against that channel's required-field spec before you publish.
MartechFlow is built around exactly this: from one source of product data you generate channel-ready shopping feeds for Google Shopping, Meta, Snapchat, and TikTok, each validated for that channel and served at a stable URL the channel pulls from on schedule.