Moloco Commerce Media offers two integration standards for item metadata: SSPI (Single Seller Per Item) and MSPI (Multiple Sellers Per Item).

Choosing the right format is a trade-off between immediate integration simplicity and future architectural flexibility. While SSPI offers a quicker start for standard retailers, MSPI provides the infrastructure necessary for marketplaces and scalable growth.

Option 1: SSPI (Single Seller Per Item)

Pros:

• Simplified Integration: Requires generating only one CSV feed. There is no need to engineer a separate seller mapping file, reducing the initial development burden.
• Rapid Deployment: For strict single-seller platforms, this aligns with existing database exports, making the adaptation of current product feeds relatively trivial.

Cons:

• Technical Debt & Rigidity: SSPI is not forward-compatible. If your business model evolves to include third-party sellers, or multiple entities promoting the same item_id, you cannot use SSPI.
• Migration Costs: Transitioning from SSPI to MSPI later is a complex migration. It requires re-provisioning your environment with Moloco Engineering and completely reformatting your feeds, which risks disrupting active campaigns.
• Deprioritized Feature Set: As MSPI is the industry standard for retail media, Moloco prioritizes feature enhancements for MSPI architectures.

Option 2: MSPI (Multiple Sellers Per Item)

MSPI utilizes a relational structure where a single item_id can be associated with multiple sellers. Even if you currently operate as a single seller, you can utilize MSPI by populating the seller feed with a single entity.

Architecture

This approach requires maintaining two synchronized feeds:

• Item Feed: General attributes (ID, Title, Category, Description).
• Seller Feed: Dynamic mapping (Seller ID, Price, Stock Status).

Pros:

• Future-Proof Architecture: Adopting MSPI eliminates the need for re-platforming if you expand to a marketplace model. You can onboard new sellers simply by updating the Seller Feed without altering the core Item Feed.
• Moloco Recommended: This is Moloco’s preferred integration method, ensuring better long-term support and feature availability.

Cons:

• Higher Initial Overhead: You must implement and maintain two distinct data streams. This increases the complexity of your ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipelines.
• Data Synchronization: Updates require coordination. For example, adding a new product requires an entry in the Item Feed and a corresponding entry in the Seller Feed.
• Debugging Complexity: Troubleshooting visibility issues (e.g., an item not serving ads) requires checking both files. An item may exist in the catalog but fail to serve if the linkage in the Seller Feed is missing.

Key Considerations and Recommendations

• Choose MSPI if: There is any possibility that your business will evolve into a marketplace, or if multiple entities might ever promote the same item. The slight increase in initial development work (generating two files instead of one) acts as insurance against a costly, disruptive migration in the future.
• Choose SSPI if: You are certain the platform will remain a single-seller environment indefinitely and you need the fastest possible route to live traffic.

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If you choose SSPI and later decide to support multiple sellers, the migration will involve significant coordination with Moloco and potential downtime. When in doubt, build for MSPI.