Adding Values to Google Export?

Hello All,



I hope everyone is well. Just two quick questions involving Google Export:


  1. What are the attributes that CS-Cart automatically handles for us when we save a product? I'm guessing id, title, description, link, image link, additional image link, price, color (apparel), and size (apparel). Am I wrong here?


  2. Since the attribute requirements changed last year, and I carry apparel, I will have to add certain attributes into Google Export Features in order for my products to be listed by Google, correct? I'm deducing I'll have to add gender and age group. Does anyone know exactly which attributes I'll need to add?



    Thanks in advance for any replies. I'm brand new here and loving CS-Cart so far. Can't wait for CS-Cart 3 to be released.



    Cheers,



    Luke

    MedievalClothier.com

If you are a US (and seleccted other countries) provider of Apparel, you can't meet Google's requirements with the Data Feeds (or Google Export) addons. Google requires that Apparel providers provide a separate entry for every combination of Color, Pattern and Gender. So if you have 3 colors, 2 patterns and 2 Genders supported for your hats, you will need 3 * 2 * 2 (12 entries) to cover the combinations. Note also that Google also requires a unique image for each combination.



So if you sell Apparel, you might be out of luck without using a 3rd party solution like http://www.ez-ms.com…ata-feeds.html. But if you don't have the supporting data (like the unique imagery) it also won't help you. But it will generate the combinations.

tbirnseth,



Thank you so much for steering me in the right direct. Do you know if Cs-Cart 3 plans on having better Google Merchant functionality built in?



Cheers,



Luke

No It doesnt, not to support apparel etc and all extra images required. Im in UK and we dont have to abide by those rules yet but its gonna be a pain if it does come



John

Any idea just why Google has become so draconian for apparel attributes?

Because Target, JCP and Sears have much more money to spend than you do and it's a way to squeeze the smaller guys out of the advertising space. You can get around it by only listing one gender, pattern, color and supplying one image. For my XML Data Feeds everthing works per Big-G's specs but most merchants don't have the underlying data images to support it. Not sure if they actually verify uniqueness or whether they just require it for images.

Tony, thanks again for all your help today. I just don't understand how merchants are supposed to comply with these new requirements. Shoppers use a drop-down menu to select variants and go from there - they aren't taken to a separate URL for each variant.



So if we want to be compliant and get every product (and variant) listed, we have to have an image for each variant and have a programmer rewrite the URLs so each varaint has a unique URL?

I don't think the URL's have to be different since we're dealing with variants. At least that's not what I've read from their specs. Since they all use the same GTIN and are within the same “Product Group ID” they can have a single URL but are required to have a unique image per combination of pattern, gender and color.



Sorry, it's been a bit since I dove into this stuff. Since 2.2.4 bulit-in works good enough for most non-apparel products, sales of my addon have dropped off considerably. Hence, it's not something I've been looking at in detail lately. However, my addon does still deal with creating multple export files based on language and currency combinations as well as properly dealing with the product grouping required for apparel products.

[quote name='tbirnseth' timestamp='1330556933' post='132368']

I don't think the URL's have to be different since we're dealing with variants. At least that's not what I've read from their specs. Since they all use the same GTIN and are within the same “Product Group ID” they can have a single URL but are required to have a unique image per combination of pattern, gender and color.



Sorry, it's been a bit since I dove into this stuff. Since 2.2.4 bulit-in works good enough for most non-apparel products, sales of my addon have dropped off considerably. Hence, it's not something I've been looking at in detail lately. However, my addon does still deal with creating multple export files based on language and currency combinations as well as properly dealing with the product grouping required for apparel products.

[/quote]



Tony I'd just like to say your addon makes the whole system work much better and we get good results with it.

[quote name='tbirnseth' timestamp='1330556933' post='132368']

I don't think the URL's have to be different since we're dealing with variants. At least that's not what I've read from their specs. Since they all use the same GTIN and are within the same “Product Group ID” they can have a single URL but are required to have a unique image per combination of pattern, gender and color.



Sorry, it's been a bit since I dove into this stuff. Since 2.2.4 bulit-in works good enough for most non-apparel products, sales of my addon have dropped off considerably. Hence, it's not something I've been looking at in detail lately. However, my addon does still deal with creating multple export files based on language and currency combinations as well as properly dealing with the product grouping required for apparel products.

[/quote]



Hi Tony,



Will your addons be compatible with CS-Cart 3?

Some are already 3.0 compatible (this one is not yet).

I've only had 1 request to make one of my addons 3.0 compatible so it appears that at this time there would be very little return on my investment.