# Preparing Data For Incremental Product Feed

Incremental Updates (otherwise known as 'partial updates' or 'deltas') permit customers to update or add catalogue data on-the-fly without the need to complete a full re-index. This method is applicable for many day-to-day use cases (see below) and, aside from being much faster than the full update process (users need only present a subset of catalogue data rather than the whole collection), users can also continue to access the Merchandising Studio tool throughout their execution, so business productivity is unaffected.

#### Typical Use Cases <a href="#dataintegrationspecification-csvproductdata-typicalusecases" id="dataintegrationspecification-csvproductdata-typicalusecases"></a>

Through the course of online (and offline) trading during the day, it is often the case that a product's attributes change in value and it is important that Fredhopper reflects these changes.

For example:

* An item's stock level may decrease
* An item's price value may increase
* A new variant has been added to the product catalogue

In each case above, incremental updates allow the customer to inform Fredhopper of these changes in a lightweight manner.

{% content-ref url="/pages/vun1d9jyzCUVKN4RN69l" %}
[Incremental Feed JSON Data Format](/product-discovery/sending-and-managing-product-data/flatfiles/incrementalprodfeed/incremental-feed-json-data-format.md)
{% endcontent-ref %}

{% content-ref url="/pages/y9PhIAPfLeT7i1cktxAt" %}
[Incremental Feed CSV Data Format](/product-discovery/sending-and-managing-product-data/flatfiles/incrementalprodfeed/incremental-feed-csv-data-format.md)
{% endcontent-ref %}


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