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Feedonomics is a Business Reporter client

For businesses, there’s no time like the holidays – but poor product feed management could limit your presents this season.

There’s a lot of money to be made during the holidays, to the tune of $4 billion each day for 25 days straight. But that doesn’t mean your business is guaranteed to get in on the action.

How people shop is changing, so getting in on the holiday hustle and bustle requires a new approach. For proof, consider this: generative AI use for holiday shopping increased 693 per cent from 2024 to 2025. Meanwhile, 80 per cent of holiday shoppers use Google or YouTube at some point during their hunt.

Feed management is the key to ensuring your business shows up year-round, but it’s especially critical during the competitive holiday season. But why?

What is feed management?

In short: product feed management is the act of maintaining, optimising and distributing product data across your website and any marketplaces or channels your brand uses.

It’s highly likely you’re practicing feed management to some degree already, whether you’re including keywords in product titles, ensuring pricing is accurate across your site or keeping product descriptions up to date with your latest branding.

When you first launch your business, feed management can be fairly simple, especially if you only have a few products and they’re only on your site. But as you scale your business, both in SKU count and across social channels and marketplaces, feed management becomes increasingly time-consuming and difficult to manage.

This is where modern feed management, including a feed management platform, comes into play.

Feed for the holidays: three benefits of modern feed management

A strategic feed management approach paired with a modern feed management platform can help you drive brand visibility and make the most of the holidays.

Here are three ways modern feed management can help you this holiday season and beyond:

Improve your Google Shopping presence

Google’s audience size is in the billions. While you can’t expect to snag every member of this giant demographic, maintaining a strong presence on Google Shopping is crucial to inbound traffic this holiday season.

Without the right product data – title, price, categorisation, availability, images, material description, etcetera – your Google Shopping coverage will dip.

“Most merchants assume their products are showing up on their ad channels,” says Michaela Weber, VP Product Payments at Commerce. “But most of the time they’re not and nobody is telling them.”

Again, maintaining this information manually is possible in some cases, but as your catalogue grows and you expand your business across other channels, this task becomes difficult, consuming time you definitely won’t have during the holiday rush.

Gain visibility on social media

Over half of product discovery – 53 per cent – occurs through social media.

Without accurate product information, scaling your efforts across social media becomes an exercise in frustration that will only punish the customer. For example, if you aren’t maintaining accurate info on your site, you’ll wind up running social media posts and ads that include the same inaccurate info.

Feed management best practices (plus a little help from a modern platform) ensure you have quality data at the source, meaning you can then have quality data across your social media – accurate pricing, titles, stock and so on.

While Google ads won’t show up on most social media posts, keep in mind they will show up on YouTube.

Free up resources for the holiday hustle

Feed management takes time, especially at scale. The last thing you need to be worrying about during the holiday rush is whether you properly catalogued the material of a polyester leopard-print jacket. And even if you did, feed fixes take time to go into effect, so it’ll be too late.

Meanwhile, modern feed management tools can enable automation, syncing your inventory with your ordering systems while streamlining actual catalogue updates with a single click. Get the data right at the source and the platform can push that same accurate, enriched information across every channel.

“Effective feed management is crucial during the holiday rush,” says Keith Karlick, Product Management Director at Commerce. “It streamlines your operations, allowing your team to focus on strategic tasks that drive growth. Optimising your feeds ultimately means your business can adapt quickly and stay competitive throughout the season and beyond.”

For instance, customers using Feedonomics can reduce the time they spend on feed management by 43 per cent. That’s time you can spend on neglected holiday prep tasks, such as brainstorming extra creative marketing efforts, running A/B tests well in advance of the season or reaching out to potential partners for promotional support.

The holidays can’t wait

The right feed management approach and tools can make feed management itself faster and easier than ever. But feed optimisation itself takes time to deliver full benefits. Just like SEO, or brewing a mug of coffee.

Don’t wait until the holidays are near to start your feed management journey, otherwise you’ll be too late. Take the first step and schedule a free feed audit with Feedonomics. From there, a specialist will learn about your business and challenges. Then, the Feedonomics FeedGrader™ will analyse your product data, weigh it against best practices and identify more than 50 common feed challenges you can start fixing immediately.

Shopping and decorations can wait, but feed management can’t. Take the first step toward a better holiday season and schedule a free feed audit today.

Schedule a free feed audit.