New attributes for Google and Shopping.com feeds

Aug 28, 2009

We discovered a bug where the expiration_date attribute for Google Feeds was not being updated if the Yahoo Store had not been published in a long time. This caused a handful of feeds to be submitted today with an expiration date in the past. We refunded the submission fee for those affected customers, fixed the bug, and manually resubmitted those feeds.

We have added a 'merchant sku' attribute to all Shopping.com data feeds to conform with their new feed requirements ( http://www.design-shopping.com/merchant_news/apr09/feeds.htm ) effective August 30, 2009. You may need to update the mapping in your Shopping.com merchant account. You may also need to supply a value for the manufacturer field. You may be able to use your store name as the manufacturer if you do not have product-specific information in your Yahoo back-end.

We have added a 'weight' attribute to all Google Base data feeds, because it is a recommended attribute. The values will be blank by default. If your Yahoo Store catalog has a field like 'ship-weight', then simply go to Define Fields and enter the field name as the Catalog Field Name for 'weight'. The 'weight' attribute has been inserted after the 'product_type' attribute, so if you are using this feed for non-Google purposes, you may want to review the column order for compatibility.

We instituted the following new pricing policy on August 21st. The Advanced data feed daily maintenance fee will be suspended if the feed has more than 30 days of inactivity (i.e. no processing tasks). This will allow you to preserve your advanced feed settings during times when you are not using the data feed.

In addition to continual refinements, we have a several new features on our site. We have redone the support section of our site with a find-as-you-type question search. There are multiple ways to view the support topics, and we have added and updated many topics. We have also revamped the 'Add Feed' page to make the user-interface much easier to use.

More Blog Posts

• 'free shipping' text prohibited by Google (Nov 10, 2009)
• New Monitus Category Data Feed (Oct 21, 2009)
• Disable Fields Feature Added (Oct 16, 2009)
• Internal system errors resolved (Sep 21, 2009)
• Bing Cashback Feed Setup Instructions Posted (Sep 4, 2009)
• New attributes for Google and Shopping.com feeds (Aug 28, 2009)
• Advanced data feed service launched (Jul 15, 2009)
• New Data Feeds Supported (Jun 26, 2009)
• Data Quality Improvement (Jun 10, 2009)
• 'Condition' attribute and other news (Jun 5, 2009)
• Character Encoding Issues (May 29, 2009)