Inbound vs. outbound feeds
An inbound feed comes from a supplier or distributor into your store - new stock levels, prices, and product data your platform needs to ingest on a schedule. An outbound feed goes the other way - your store's catalog formatted for a marketplace, comparison shopping engine, or ad platform to consume. A migration usually touches both: your new platform needs to keep receiving supplier feeds in whatever format they already send, and needs to produce outbound feeds in the format each destination expects, which isn't always identical to what your old platform produced.
Why feeds break during a migration
Feed formats are rarely a universal standard - a supplier's feed might use field names, category codes, or identifiers that your old platform's integration was custom-built to parse. Moving to a new platform means that parsing logic needs to be rebuilt, not assumed to carry over, even if the feed file itself doesn't change. The same applies in reverse: an outbound feed your marketplace or ad account depends on needs to keep matching that channel's required format after the move, or the channel may reject or misread it.
What a managed migration checks
We map every active inbound and outbound feed during the assessment - what format it's in, what fields it maps to, and how often it runs - so nothing breaks silently after cutover. A supplier feed that stops being parsed correctly doesn't throw an error most of the time; it just quietly stops updating stock or prices, which is worse than an obvious failure because it can go unnoticed for a while.
Frequently asked questions
Will my supplier's feed work automatically on my new platform?
Not automatically - the new platform needs an integration built (or reused, if a compatible connector exists) to parse that specific feed's format. We evaluate each supplier feed individually during the assessment rather than assuming a generic import will handle it.
What happens to my Google Shopping or marketplace feed during a migration?
It needs to keep matching the destination's required format after the move. We check outbound feeds as part of the migration plan so a channel doesn't reject your catalog or show stale data after cutover.
Is a product feed the same as a CSV export?
A CSV export can be a product feed, but 'feed' usually implies a recurring, automated exchange on a schedule, not a one-time manual export - though the underlying file format can be identical.
Can two systems use completely different feed formats for the same data?
Yes, this is common - the same catalog data might be exported as one XML structure for one marketplace and a different CSV structure for another, or use different field names and category taxonomies entirely, requiring separate mapping for each.