so we're running cscart 2.1 and I am trying to create a datafeed for Google Merchant.
GM requires the following fields:
id
title
description
product url
image url
condition
availability
price
Now I can only map fields with what I have in cscart, so here is where I run into a couple of problems:
description - they expect it with plain text and the description field in cscart contains html
condition - obviously everything is “new”, so I am assuming it would be safe to just create a feature for all of th products and then add feature in the feed? Is there a easier method?
availability - they expect only 4 specific values which have no relation to what cscart has. So how do I field that? Create additional, static fields in SQL DB?
price - they want the currency at the end of the price eg. “35 $”, whereas the “Price” field in cscart only provides you with a number itself
Are settings of the fields etc in your plugin customizable? Does it fix the issues I mentioned in my orignal post? Also, we would be needing it also in cscart 4.0 which we are soon upgrading to.
Yes, it is VERY possible. We just created “Product Features” with what needed for Google and other shopping comparison sites. Then we created a customer “data feed” and pull from that information we put in the features. We keep these features hidden so the general public does not see them. They are only used for the feeds. We did not purchase any 3rd party system, but it will require a little time to set it up. Again, we do not use the default “Google export” but instead created a new “data feed” with the needed information. Then we put in the FTP, etc and upload it when we want.
I am not moving the addon to V4. As clips said, there are ways to get cs-cart to do what is needed. But if you wanted a turn-key solution for V2 or V3 then this addon will do the trick.
Yes, it is VERY possible. We just created “Product Features” with what needed for Google and other shopping comparison sites. Then we created a customer “data feed” and pull from that information we put in the features. We keep these features hidden so the general public does not see them. They are only used for the feeds. We did not purchase any 3rd party system, but it will require a little time to set it up. Again, we do not use the default “Google export” but instead created a new “data feed” with the needed information. Then we put in the FTP, etc and upload it when we want.
BTW, I did NOT mod the database at all.
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Yea I know you can bypass a few things by features, but how could I make use of them with my problems stated above:
description
price
availability - you can set it as static values, but how can I make it up-to-date daily?
The “description” that is exported does not contain html that seems to freak Google out. I have been submitting the normal description for quite some time and Google has never rejected it unless I put an actual web address in the description. Maybe they scrub the html or something, I'm not for sure.
I have no idea what you mean by “price”. We submit the price straight from CS-Cart and it is never rejected. I have never put the $ sign at the end. I guess maybe you are from a different country and the requirements are different?
On availability, yes, we did “rig” this a little. We created an “In Stock” field. Generally speaking we can always get items back in stock and we try to keep all of our regular items we post on Google in stock. So when a product becomes out of stock we simple remove it from the feed and upload a new version. It does take a day or 2 for it to come off Google so we try to watch it closely.
Here is a copy of the data feed we created and the mapped fields.
[attachment=7885:Google Data feed.jpg]
Again, it does take a little while to set it up but it has worked well for us. We actually have custom “features” set up for every product because we have quite a few different comparison sites we list on.
Thanks for answers, I managed to create the datafeed with help of cscartrocks. It works well.
Aside of that, one question I have about images. I get a critical error from the datafeed, because images are not allowed for crawling in robots.txt. The simple solution would be just to delete this line from the file, but I am not sure exactly what impact will there be of suddenly indexing ten thousands of images or more? Our images are not even unique, mostly taken from supplier's or manufacturer's websites.
Thanks for answers, I managed to create the datafeed with help of cscartrocks. It works well.
Aside of that, one question I have about images. I get a critical error from the datafeed, because images are not allowed for crawling in robots.txt. The simple solution would be just to delete this line from the file, but I am not sure exactly what impact will there be of suddenly indexing ten thousands of images or more? Our images are not even unique, mostly taken from supplier's or manufacturer's websites.
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Google need the url of the product image otherwise your products will not be displayed in google shopping.
Google is rejecting the image URL with ?t=1212483224. What the hell is that t=... even? Is that neccessery, what was wrong with just the URL ending with .img?
Google is rejecting the image URL with ?t=1212483224. What the hell is that t=... even? Is that neccessery, what was wrong with just the URL ending with .img?
What version do you use? Please try the following solution: