Froogle datafeed no longer working

[ryan@ddm]

SS 8.3 Pro on Solaris/SPARC:

Datafeed was working properly under 8.2

When I went to make a new submission today, I received the following error (using FTP transfer due to my large number of products...)

gBase Response Code: 426
gBase Response Message:
Google Error Encountered

In the Google base dashboard, I get only the following (unhelpful) information: "Bulk upload failed. No items are live. There are too many formatting errors in your file."

No example errors are identified.

SS - any assistance with this issue?

[loren_d_c]

Datafeed was working properly under 8.2

So is this the first time you have tried the FTP method, which is new in v8.3? If so, please make sure that you followed the proper steps when you setup the FTP access for bulk uploads in your Google Base account, that you have the proper FTP username and password from your Google Base account entered in the ShopSite configuration, and that you specified the correct bulk upload filename in your Google Base account.

If you've done all this and/or you've successfully submitted the feed via the FTP method before, then it's probably a temporary Google problem. They do not notify merchants (or ShopSite) when their submission system goes down, which it does occasionally, so you may just have to wait it out.

-Loren

[ryan@ddm]

Thanks Loren,

Yes, the FTP submission was working properly before. The dashboard showed just a couple formatting errors in my file. I was too busy and did not look to see what the errors were at the time.

I re-tried the FTP submission and was able to send the products successfully. If, after processing, Google still tells me there are errors in the file, what is the next step? Send my file to Shopsite to assess the cause of the formatting errors? The output of the SS datafeed generator should be fully compliant with the Google datafeed formatting...

[loren_d_c]

The output of the SS datafeed generator should be fully compliant with the Google datafeed formatting...

'Compliant' when you are talking about Froogle/Google Products/Google Base (which is perpetually in Beta) is somewhat of a moving target. But there are some things that YOU may be able to do if they reject your feed, for example if they say you have products with no pictures or descriptions (they say they will eventually enforce some additional requirements like this) then you will need to add those things to your ShopSite products. And again, their feed parsing system may be down or have bugs one day and reject one of your feeds, and they may fix it without notice a few days later and the same feed may be accepted. So with them sometimes you just have to keep trying. It's unfortunate that Google hasn't taken their Froogle product more seriously and treated the API's for it more professionally.

-Loren

[ryan@ddm]

'Compliant' when you are talking about Froogle/Google Products/Google Base (which is perpetually in Beta) is somewhat of a moving target.

Of course. And also, if there are any changes I can make, I will do so, pronto! Their error message simply didn't even give me a place to start looking...