It matters because every additional channel wants the same information in a slightly different shape. A shopping listing, a marketplace, a social commerce feature, and a comparison site each specify their own required fields and formats. Maintaining those separately means updating a price in five places, which nobody sustains, and the result is channels showing prices you no longer charge and items you no longer stock.
The failure that costs actual money is stale availability. A feed that has not refreshed will sell something you do not have, which produces a cancelled order, an unhappy customer, and on some platforms a penalty against your account for poor fulfilment. Refresh frequency matters more than any optimisation, and it is the first thing to check when something goes wrong.
The way to keep this manageable is one source of truth. Your store platform holds the catalogue, and everything else is generated from it automatically rather than maintained by hand. Most mainstream platforms offer applications that produce and update feeds for the major destinations, and using them is not a compromise, it is the only approach that survives contact with a real product range.
Where you should spend effort is on the source data rather than the plumbing. Titles structured consistently, descriptions that are specific, clean images, and correct identifiers improve performance everywhere at once, because every destination reads the same underlying fields.
Check what the feed actually contains rather than trusting the tool that generates it. Export it, open it, and read a few rows against what is on your site. Truncated titles, descriptions carrying stray formatting, prices excluding tax where a channel expects it included, and missing identifiers are all common and all invisible until something underperforms. Ten minutes reading the file directly answers questions that guessing about performance does not.
Set the refresh frequency to match how quickly your prices and stock change rather than accepting a default. A daily refresh is adequate for a stable catalogue and inadequate for a business running promotions or holding limited quantities, where a stale feed sells things you no longer have at prices you no longer charge. Most platforms allow scheduled and immediate updates, and knowing which yours uses matters when something goes wrong.