Google/Froogle Feed

[waveneybooks]

Be sure to submit your products to Froogle

Apologies for hijacking your thread
Is there a simple way to submit products to Froogle/Google Base? I've had a look at the instructions many times, but can't work out how to get them from Zencart to there!
Tina

[dinki]

Hijacking your own thread? I know where you're coming from so no big deal

First, make sure you have a froogle account set up. You'll do this at http://base.google.com . Then, you need the froogle contribution installed. I'm using the one at http://www.breakmyzencart.com/froogle . Use your username, password that you set up at google base. Then go to Admin->Tools->Froogle file generator. At this point you want to generate your froogle file.

You can try to FTP straight from your zencart admin page, but I can't do it because of Godaddy's shared hosting policy and the inability to use scripts on their side. This is easily circumvented by right clicking on the link next to "View File" and do a "save link as". Put the file somewhere where you can get to it (desktop).

Now, log into your google base account and click on bulk upload. You then set up a bulk upload file and then browse to the file you just saved and upload it to google base. Google base will report if there are any problems with your file. If there are, fix them and try again. It may take up to 24 hours before your files are searchable in Froogle.

Best of luck and I hope you're not selling decals!

If you need any help, just ask.

[waveneybooks]

Hijacking your own thread? I know where you're coming from so no big deal

No, I'm not going crazy (well not over this, anway). I think somebody must have moved me, to give me my own thread, thanks guys

Thanks for the info Dinki, I'll take a look.
No, not decals, books.
Tina

[rwoody]

I've just installed the feed and it works perfect, except this site has SEO friendly URLs. The feed outputs the native URLs. Now they work, but will that cause a problem with Google as my site feeds to them show the SEO friendly URLs for the Google Site Map.

[TheWetFish]

Thanks Dinki for the advice when using godaddy hosting. I recently switched to them and just learning how they do things. I hope they are decent hosting to go thru without much downtime at all.

Never used froogle before so any hints would be appreciated. Uploaded the text file, but how do I know if everything went ok or not?

Thanks,
Matt

[dinki]

I've been using Godaddy for a few different sites for about three years and haven't had any problems with them. I know others have complained about their service/product, but I have nothing but praise. It is a bit harder to do things without shell access but I've been able to work around everything I need. For the price you pay, they're hard to beat!

After uploading the file, go back to the bulk upload page in a few hours and it will tell you if the file had any errors or if your listing is pending. As for knowing if the products are listed, you can easily go to froogle.com and search for your website (ie 'decaldepot.net') in the search and it will show all the products for your site.

[TheWetFish]

Thanks Dinki for the information.

With the godaddy topic, I am a bit more at ease with having my site hosted there now. My last host was fine, but too much downtime for a business.

I just checked the google base and it went through with 0 errors.

Matt

[TheWetFish]

UPDATE** I just got an email from google base and since I had some items as specials, they rejected my upload after things already show as listed..lol. I was having a Veteran's Day Sale specials running. Guess they are not too patriotic.. Well wanted to post my results and their reasons for denying my upload in order to help others out a bit when getting things ready to list in froogle.

Matt