Hey, is anyone else worried about these changes… will CS Cart come up with a plugin or update to help with these changes and requirements. YOU CAN READ MORE ABOUT GOOGLE BASE NEW POLICIES HERE:
http://base-forum-announcements.blogspot.com/2011/07/weve-made-changes-to-google-product.html
This is going to be a mess for a lot of people, not many people are happy with these changes . I get a lot of hits off Google product search , I don't list availability on my products since my inventory changes by the day and now that this is mandatory, I don't know what to do.
I understand what you mean. Im not sure if a lot of people know about these changes. Google has already disapproved my feeds and will suspend my account.
Hello bigjmart,
Thank you for the provided information.
I have forwarded this issue to our engineers. They will consider it and make the necessary code changes (if it is need it) in one of our future releases.
—
Anastasiya Kozlova
CS-Cart Support Team
[quote name='gasngrills' timestamp='1315174459' post='120967']
This is going to be a mess for a lot of people, not many people are happy with these changes . I get a lot of hits off Google product search , I don't list availability on my products since my inventory changes by the day and now that this is mandatory, I don't know what to do.
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Same here. Very concerned about this. I'll upgrade if they come up with a fix for this.
We ended up just using the “Data Feeds” addon to be able to still list on Google. It took a little longer to figure out everything, but it isn't that bad. Just create the fields you need in “features” and you are good to go.
[quote name='clips' timestamp='1315274343' post='121037']
We ended up just using the “Data Feeds” addon to be able to still list on Google. It took a little longer to figure out everything, but it isn't that bad. Just create the fields you need in “features” and you are good to go.
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What do you mean just create the fields that I need in features. The availability information is not available anywhere I have seen. Could you explain how you got past this hurdle.
Images: We’re making [image link] required and we encourage you to submit up to 10 additional product images through [additional image link]. This way, you can improve the visual representation of your products.
wow
Our first feed created was Nextag.
- Fist we created various fields in “product features” that are used by various shopping comparison sites like UPC, ISBN and manufacturer. These items we left so everyone could view them on the front end because they can actually help in the search and to give unique content.
- Next we created various “hidden” features like bid amount, category for Nextag, promo text and any other field that was specific for Nextag. We did the same for Google, Shopping.com and many others.
–here is a link by CS about features…
CS-Cart Documentation — CS-Cart 4.15.x documentation
- We then go to “data feeds” and create the feed itself. See CS-Cart Documentation — CS-Cart 4.15.x documentation
We started using the ftp upload for the datafeed which has worked awesome. We have now successfully created a datafeed for the following…
Nextag, Pronto, Sort Price, Shopzilla, Become, Pricegrabber, The Find, Amazon Datafeed, Google
The only datafeed we could NOT get to work so far is…
shopping.com
For some reason the shopping.com feed has problems reading the file from CS as it keeps the “quotes” around some of the fields. All the rest of them we have been using now without any additional add on from an outside source or by using the default data feed supplied by CS-Cart in version 2.1.4.
Hope this helps.
Sorry, the feed for shopping.com works wonderful. It is the feed for shopzilla that does not work. The sad part then is shopzilla is probably the largest of all the comparison sites.
The only thing I would says that CS-Cart should add on the data feeds is a way to “duplicate” a feed. Some of the information is repetitive and would be nice to be able to duplicate and then just change the needed information.
BTW, one thing that made it easier for us is we created a new, hidden category called “comparison sites” and then put the actual items we waned in to list on the comparison sites. Some of the items we have are lower priced and not cost efficient to list when you are paying .35 cents a click.
Do you include 'google_product_category' as a feature? I ask because I have tried this and then used the data feed to generate a feed. But the features are all together in one field called features. I don't see how google will be able to pull this value out of the features feild.
[quote name='tjordan' timestamp='1315853086' post='121523']
Do you include 'google_product_category' as a feature? I ask because I have tried this and then used the data feed to generate a feed. But the features are all together in one field called features. I don't see how google will be able to pull this value out of the features feild.
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Yes I have the Google Category field I've created in the “product features” area of CS-Cart for Google. When you assign the “field” to the feed it finds it just find. You can't really export the file and look at it as the “tab” or whatever your deliminator is will probably be different the the “quotes” around the items in the features area.
[quote name='clips' timestamp='1315765214' post='121453']
Our first feed created was Nextag.
- Fist we created various fields in “product features” that are used by various shopping comparison sites like UPC, ISBN and manufacturer. These items we left so everyone could view them on the front end because they can actually help in the search and to give unique content.
- Next we created various “hidden” features like bid amount, category for Nextag, promo text and any other field that was specific for Nextag. We did the same for Google, Shopping.com and many others.
–here is a link by CS about features…
CS-Cart Documentation — CS-Cart 4.15.x documentation
- We then go to “data feeds” and create the feed itself. See CS-Cart Documentation — CS-Cart 4.15.x documentation
We started using the ftp upload for the datafeed which has worked awesome. We have now successfully created a datafeed for the following…
Nextag, Pronto, Sort Price, Shopzilla, Become, Pricegrabber, The Find, Amazon Datafeed, Google
The only datafeed we could NOT get to work so far is…
shopping.com
For some reason the shopping.com feed has problems reading the file from CS as it keeps the “quotes” around some of the fields. All the rest of them we have been using now without any additional add on from an outside source or by using the default data feed supplied by CS-Cart in version 2.1.4.
Hope this helps.
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Hey,
I need help settiing up the datafeed,
- Data feed name: what do I add here? do i use (Google Product Search)?
- Images directory: do I leave it like this? /home/xxxxxx/public_html/cart/images/backup
Files directory: /home/xxxxxx/public_html/cart/var/downloads/backup
- In Exported items do I need to add all my products to it or just categories?
- In Fields mapping- where it said (Field name) what do I add here?
and for (Field type) what dod I add here too?
Any help will be much appreicated.
Thank you
Tom
Can anyone speak to where you are mapping the availability column to. Yes, we could create a availability column but it seems like it would not be dynamic in nature. Just static. Google says that they would check to see if the items are really available and if they are not they may disable our feeds.
How is availability being updated for this solution. It looks like it is being updated manually. Is there a way to update it dynamically with the datafeed addon?
What I did was set all of my products as “available” and then disable those which aren't actually available. In the Data Feed addon, you can check “exclude disabled products”. That way you will not send out your disabled products in your feeds, and Google will never know the difference.