3 replies to this topic

[spellham]

A couple of brief questions about the way some of you use Froogle.

First, if you have many clients using similar ecommerce packages, has anyone been able to setup multiple stores (read: feeds) using the same login for your different customers? From what I'm seeing in the merchant center, I can only setup a single product feed and not multiple feeds for more than one client using a single Froogle merchant center login.

I've already written the scripts to automatically build the tab delimited feed file per customer, but I've not found a way to setup multiple "product" feeds in the Merchant Center.

I'm also interested in using the business listing feeds to upload all of our clients updated information for use in google local. I received an email from Froogle stating that this was a "new" feature to allow more accurate info in Google Local. I'd just like to be able to feed the proper data, and additional data for use by google local, ie... hours, website, tollfree, etc.. and jumpstart the process so our clients don't have to wait for Google Local to crawl for information.

I think the business listing feeds would be a great service to our customers. I've got about 1100 target ecommerce customers I'd like to attempt this with first, then over 6000 business listings that I could easily generate and upload.

I'd like to hear any of the attempts, successes and failures if anyone has tackled this type of project before.

SP

[spellham]

Wow. Nobody uses froogle or has heard of the business listings feed?

Sorry if I posted this in the wrong place, but many of my searches for 'froogle' in the forum pointed to this category.

[torka]

RE: multiple feeds on a single account. At the moment, I think you're correct that it can't be done, at least not through the standard interface. Speaking as a UI designer, it does look as though the Froogle pages were potentially laid out with that possibility in mind for the future, but I don't know of any way of doing it at present.

I do recall reading something that if you sold a large number of books, CDs or video products you could write Google to get additional feeds. I don't know if that sort of thing would be available to other types of merchants or to service providers trying to run feeds for multiple merchants, though.

I'd suggest you contact Google directly. It may be that they can set you up to do this; at the very least it will let them know there's interest in the user community, which may influence future development.

As to the business listings feed, all the businesses I work with are single location, so I haven't had reason to use it yet. Sorry.

--Torka

[spellham]

Thanks for the info Torka, I had planned on contacting Google directly, but figured I would 'wait' plenty for a response so I'd see if anyone here had tried this.

The only problem that I can see with the business feeds is that I may need to create separate feeds(manually, of course) for each of our active customers as they are not the same business with multiple locations.

Then again, if it doesn't violate any Google/Froogle TOS, I could create a single feed for all FSN members with the 'store number' option that they offer, even though the businesses only common relationship is being a flower shop and being members of FSN. I'm just trying to create benefit for our customers that may not have the technical expertise or inclination to promote themselves further on the web. Read: adding value to our products and services.

Thanks again,

SP