Data Feed Creator

Product search platforms like Google Shopping and Bing Shopping discover PulseTV's catalog through structured data feeds — large, regularly-updated files that describe every available product in a format each platform expects. Data Feed Creator is the Blazor app that produces those feeds: it pulls inventory and pricing from the company's e-commerce system, transforms each product into the right shape for the target platform, and publishes the feed on a schedule.

The current version is a Blazor rewrite of an older app I didn't have access to the source code for. The feature set and export format had to be reconstructed by studying the feeds the old app produced and the requirements of the platforms consuming them, then rebuilding the application from scratch around those constraints — an interesting exercise in working backward from outputs to behavior.

The trick with feeds isn't generating them once — it's keeping them right over time. Products go out of stock, prices change, descriptions get edited, categories shift, and any one of those drifting out of sync will get listings rejected by the search platforms. The app handles that by reading the latest state from the e-commerce database on every build, validating each product against the platform's required fields before it lands in the feed, and surfacing rejected products so they can be cleaned up.

The end result is a tool that turns what used to be a manual export job into a piece of background infrastructure the marketing team can configure and forget about — freeing up traffic from organic Google Shopping and Bing Shopping listings rather than paying for every click.

Before & After