uploading to google merchant center

[spawnie69]

Is there a recommended method to upload a file with products to google merchant center?

I looked at Google Merchant Center Feeder, but it doesn't seem to be up to date for 1.58a.

[RacingAddiction]

Spawnie,
we're on 1.5.6 and just about to jump to 1.5.8. From what I saw there were two methods, their API and an XML upload. We do the latter every night and it works fine, we create the XML every day (with current prices and stock levels) and then Google fetches it from our site. (You could do it more often if you wish.) The XML method is highly configurable and the advantage of it over the API is you can get it up and running almost immediately.

The biggest piece of advice I can offer is to make sure you include the required fields that Google MC wants to see, otherwise it has a cow. The fields are: availability, brand, condition, description, GTIN, image link, link (product), MPN, price, product type and title. They have a very powerful script engine (in Feed Rules) that you can use to manipulate your data after it uploads and before it's digested, for example I take the MPN and tack it onto the product title so that when Google displays our products in a browser search it looks similar to this: Sparco Seat ADV XT Black, 008002ZNR. Make sure your image and product links are canonical! Otherwise you'll have a metric ton of crawl errors.

Hope this helps!