Mission Mercantile has been a DataFeedWatch customer for 4 years, using the tool to manage their product listings efficiently, save a lot of time, eliminate product feed errors, and manage advertising priorities in Google, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Microsoft Bing, and several marketplaces.
“The time we gained with DataFeedWatch has been …. almost infinite!”
says Chuck Bowen, CEO and Co-Founder of Mission Mercantile, San Antonio, Texas.
About Mission Mercantile
Beyond producing extraordinary and lasting products with venerable craftsmanship and old-world manufacturing techniques, we seek to build genuine and lasting connections with the Mission Men and Women our remarkable leather products are designed to serve.
Today, Mission Mercantile exists to carry those uncompromising personal standards of quality and integrity into the future through the remarkable, vegetable, and chrome-tanned leather goods crafted with carefully selected 100% full grain steer hides that bear our name.
Our family has over 150 years of merchant/mercantile history on both sides of our family tree. My personal mercantile story begins in 1903 with the Claxton Carriage and Hardware Company, located in Claxton, Georgia. It's the oldest continually operating business in Evans County.
Read this amazing story in full on the Mission Mercantile website.
Problem: poor feed customization offered by Shopify
The initial problem was that we struggled to customize our product feeds to meet our specific requirements. The off-the-shelf capabilities provided by platforms like Shopify fell short of allowing us to tailor our feeds according to our needs. As a result, we couldn't showcase the exact products we wanted or include important data points like GTIN or MPN. This lack of customization limited our ability to make our products visible or maximize the effectiveness of our ads.
Another problem was that it took ages to load products one by one. Adding new products, changing specifications, and managing listings was a tedious process. Manual work greatly limited our ability to advertise products even on a single channel like Google.
Ads have been very, very important for us, specifically over the last three years during the pandemic and post-pandemic reality. We wanted to pick up market share so in order for that to happen, the ability to manipulate and customize that product feed for our ads was very important. I would say that's probably the biggest problem - how to maximize or increase the effectiveness of the ads that we display.
Solution: managing feeds with customization features for each channel
To overcome these limitations, we turned to DataFeedWatch. By implementing DataFeedWatch four years ago, we gained the ability to customize our feeds to a much greater extent than before.
- It provided us the flexibility to eliminate unwanted products, include personalized offerings, and map our SKU as an alternative to missing data points.
- DataFeedWatch proved indispensable for our advertising efforts across multiple channels. We utilized it to optimize our ads on Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, and more.
- Additionally, as we also operated in wholesale and retail, DataFeedWatch allowed us to differentiate the products we offered on each channel. We could exclude certain items from direct consumer sales while featuring them in our wholesale catalog. This level of control over our feeds enabled us to meet the requirements of various advertising platforms and optimize our ads accordingly.
Results: gaining time - infinite amounts!
We achieved significant improvements in our advertising endeavors. While our organic traffic played a vital role, our ads became instrumental in driving targeted traffic to our online store. With DataFeedWatch, we witnessed an increase in conversion rates and enhanced the effectiveness of our ads. Although we couldn't provide specific stand-alone metrics for this case study, we can confidently state that DataFeedWatch played a crucial role in maximizing our conversion rates and overall ad performance.
Moreover, DataFeedWatch saved us invaluable time and effort in managing our feeds. Instead of manually inputting data for each product on multiple platforms, we could leverage the tool's capabilities to streamline the process. It allowed us to upload product information directly from Shopify and customize the feeds effortlessly. This time-saving aspect was particularly significant as it freed up our resources to focus on other crucial aspects of our business. The time we gained has been almost infinite!
