Google Product Search/Google Base Data Feed

[rblack]

What is this feature and can it still be used if you have an e-commerce site of your own design and are simply inserting the "order anywhere" code?

[Jim]

The Google Product Search/Google Base Data Feed feature sends a list of your products and required fields to Google for indexing in the Google search feature.

There are many fields that are required to be sent, most of which you would probably not fill in in your ShopSite products if you are using the Order Anywhere feature. So unless you want to fill in all data for each product in your ShopSite database the feature probably would not work for you. (And if you are going to fill in all the information for the products in the ShopSite database you just as well use ShopSite to generate the pages and eliminate the hand work of adding the order anywhere code to your other pages.)

[rblack]

I had a hunch that might be the case. Do you know for sure that this feature won't work UNLESS you operate through a shopsite generated store?

For now I'd like to operate with the site I have. Does anyone know another route regardless of the labor involved?

Thanks.

[Jim]

You can go to Google's site and find the specifications for the data format that they require. ShopSite uses the xml format but I believe there is also a csv format that they accept. They are very picky as to what is included in the feed and that all urls will resolve properly to pages, images etc. If you leave out one field that they require in a single product they can reject your entire file. It is possible to do but wouldn't be much fun doing.