eCommerce Feeds

[David M. Graham]

Daniel,

This is not really an issue.  Google processes each feed, and that processing takes time.  When Google reports accepting a feed, it does not mean that the individual products are accepted.  If they don't meet Google Merchant criteria, they won't be...

David

[fierydomain]

Apparently the issue has resolved itself.  The products are now showing active in the merchant center.  Evidently there is a delay between when the products are submitted and accepted and when they actually show up under the active products.

[fierydomain]

David,

I submitted a new feed using google_base in my cart because I re-did some of my categories and the feed expired too.  After I submitted the feed on the cart side, I logged into my google merchant account, and I looked under data feeds.  When I look under data feeds, I see that google accepted 962 out of 962 products.  However, when i look under active products it says that there are no products published.  I spoke with Denver briefly this morning, and he had me do a search for an active product in my catalog using google to verify that the product is coming up in the search results.  Needless to say, I was able to pull it up by searching the following "Altar Bell with Pentagram Design charmed touches" in google.  The altar bell is the first active product in my catalog.  Any ideas what may be causing this and how to fix it?  Also, when I go to re-submit the feed when it expires, do I need to delete the old feed on googles end before I upload the new one?

Thanks,

Daniel

[David M. Graham]

Good questions.

Feeds have providers and consumers.  When your cart generates a feed for something, it is acting as a feed provider, and those reading it are consumers.

Some consumers are more equal than others, and set their own requirements for the feeds.  Google Base feed formats are a good example.  Google Base started as Froogle, and is now also known as "Google Products" but in any case, Google sets the feed specifications .

When you send a feed to Google Base, Google processes the data and, if it is acceptable in format  - includes your product in their Google Product Search pages.  This is how you gain traffic .

David

[terierni]

David,

I have read and re-read this information that you present here about feeds. As you know, I desire to learn much about this subject, so I am trying to understand your explanation:

"Feeds are simply listings of data that are structured in such a way that things can be done to or with them in an organized way."

In relation to my website, I am assuming the data is collected from and about my listings and the products I sell - please correct me if I am wrong here, I did know how else to word this 

My question is - where is the collected data being fed to (is it to search engines?) and if so, what exactly does the SE do with it once it is received?

Terri

[David M. Graham]

Feeds can be very useful in ecommerce operations.  If you know what they are and how to use them. 

Feeds are simply listings of data that are structured in such a way that things can be done to or with them in an organized way.  They can be used to perform batch operations with software or just for reading.

The structure used to present the data is known as the "format".  Popular types include the RSS, Atom and Sitemap formats.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  Means just what it says.  The format is straightforward and easy to work with after just a bit of study, though perhaps a bit less so in current releases than in the early ones.

Atom is an alternative to RSS - we'll look more at it later but keep in mind it basically serves the same purpose in a different way.

Sitemap format is a very simple format of feed used to submit site content to search engines.  Highly abbreviated there are fewer than a half dozen fields to worry about.  Yet it is a very important type of feed and extremely widely used.

These are some of the most common types of feeds, but with shopping comparison becoming popular, many others are now available.  Often each comparison site develops their own format, asking for different data and different data presentations.  We'll look at Shopzilla and a few others later on in this thread.

David