After pulling my hair out trying to get Data Feeds to meet the needs of a variety of commercial shopping sites like shopping.com, price grabber, shopzilla, etc, I finally gave up and developed an addon for what I believe is a better solution for the major players.
Yahoo developed a store export many years ago which has been adopted as a feed import format by most of the major players. The format is commonly known as objinfo.xml (Yahoo Store Export DTD).
I have developed this addon to meet the needs of one of my customers and have extended it slightly to provide some missing functionality like product condition. I have tested it against shopping.com and price grabber.
I am looking for a beta tester who uses several different shopping aggregators and who will utilize this as their “feed source”.
Benefits of being a beta tester are:
- You get input into the final product
- You get 1 free license to use the addon (planning to price it at $79.99)
Right now, it is English only. However, stores using different currencies should work correctly. The language used for retrieval of product descriptions and other text is the default language of the store. However, it has only been tested with a single language configured and the store language set to EN (English). Unless there is huge interest in other languages I will not be doing additional work to support other languages.
Documentation is located at: [url]http://www.ez-ms.com/docs/obj_feed_addon.pdf[/url]
If you are interested in beta testing this product, please contact us at the email listed at the end of the document.
Never used Yahoo’s… is that part of their merchant package where you have a monthly fee? I only use Google Base at the moment
The file format is part of their merchant solutions for their stores. A merchant on Yahoo Stores has the ability to export their products to an objinfo.xml file. The location of this file (like [url]http://www.foo.com/objinfo.xml[/url]) is used to configure shopping sites to collect a store’s product information for publication.
This addon uses Yahoo’s specification to create an objinfo.xml file which is then configured into Shopzilla, Shopping.com, pricegrabber.com, etc. Then you never have to do anything again because they go read the file to determine the products to publish.
The xml file is automatically created at a frequency configured by the admin and then the various shopping sites are configured to use this xml file as the data feed for your store.
I’ll sign up for shopping.com and try it out
Hello,
I’m the original poster of the “Would you buy a data feed addon?” thread and I agree with you that CS-Cart’s implementation of this is pretty much unusable. What I want is something that I can “set and forget” that will provide feeds according to some kind of schedule to some of the shopping comparison sites.
I have active accounts with Shopzilla and PriceGrabber which I have not used for months simply because it’s too frustrating and time consuming to create the data feeds.
I would love to be a beta tester for your addon. How do I go about that?
That is exaxtly what this addon is designed to do. To talk about being a beta tester, send an email to the address at the bottom of the documentation located at : [url]http://www.ez-ms.com/docs/obj_feed_addon.pdf[/url].
The only diffierence in your statement is that you point the shopping aggregator at this file as the source of your feed and they pick it up on their schedule. The file is updated daily, weekly or monthly depending on your settings and is checked at each admin login.
[quote name=‘tbirnseth’]To talk about being a beta tester, send an email to the address at the bottom of the documentation located at : [url]http://www.ez-ms.com/docs/obj_feed_addon.pdf[/url].[/QUOTE]
Already did that this morning.
We have now released this addon for sale. It has been tested with 2.0.15 and 2.1.0. It also now supports generation of 2 XML data files. 1 for Google Merchant (formerly Google Base) and one for most other shopping aggregaters.
The Announcment is in this article: [url]http://forum.cs-cart.com/showthread.php?p=93545#post93545[/url]
The product details page is at: [url]http://www.ez-ms.com/addonproducts/xml-data-feeds.html[/url]
And documentatio is available from the Attachments tab on the product details page above or from: [url]http://www.ez-ms.com/docs/obj_feed_addon.pdf[/url]
Any feedback is welcomed.
Completely new version of this addon is available (2.1.2).
It is much more configurable than the last version and now supports many of the Google “extended attributes” such as ISBN, MPM, UPC, etc. It will also build the Google “product type” from the category hierarchy that the product is contained in. I.e. watches/windup/this_watch, will have the product type for “this_watch” be “watches > windup” per the Google specs.
The documentation has been completely rewritten to reflect the multi-screen configuration.
Product detail:[url]http://www.ez-ms.com/addonproducts/xml-data-feeds.html[/url]
Documentation: [url]http://www.ez-ms.com/docs/obj_feed_addon.pdf[/url] (or the attachments tab of the product detail page).
I now have this addon running on my site and let me say it beats anything I’ve seen for submitting feeds to the comparison shopping engines. You just set it and forget it. What it does is creates feeds for Google Merchant and other engines like PriceGrabber, posts them on my server, and then those engines come and pick up the feeds on a regular basis (they are created daily–and Google picks up the feed daily) at the specified URLs. Awesome!
Implementation is very intuitive. Support is fantastic.
If you want to submit feeds to the shopping engines this is a dream come true. The time you will save trying to make good feeds will easily pay for the addon.