1 reply to this topic

[DJKay]

Hi,

One of our sites is an e-commerce site, selling specialized books in a niche. We want to create a product data feed and get the site into Google Merchant center so we could take advantage of product search and product extensions.....

The site uses interspire shopping cart (has api) .and there is a Google Base API (before they had merchant center..seems like from what I have read it works for merchant center)

We are only talking about 250 products..its not a huge ecommerce site. One idea would be to integrate them so when updating in interspire...updating to merchant center would take place automatically.

How long do these types of project take? Is it worth if for a small site? Anyone had any experience doing this type of work and can give me some feedback?

Like every organization, we are resource constrained...its easier to get resources after you have proven the business case. Part of me would just rather get it up there willy nilly before going the custom api integration mode...get some experience with it ...and scope out the development piece later....

You can schedule feed updates....And the marketer on the team already said that they would not have a problem just doing some sort of monthly update by hand..

Again...any thoughts or feedback appreciated....DJKay

[Mooro]

It isn't hard to create the XML Google wants.

How long? How long is a bit of string? How competent technologically are you? Does XML confuse you or make sense? Too many variables not mentioned in the question for anyone to give a really helpful answer.

My suggestion would be hand craft the XML for your products and upload it, it takes between 12 and 48 hours for Google to process the data and for you to appear in the shopping results.

I tried it and it wasn't worthwhile for me, spent hours making the XML and sorting it all out, I'd listed as many products as I possibly could (from a library of over 3 million and for the number of impressions and sales I got from it I would have been better off spending that day down the pub getting hammered.

Monthly updates by hand: automate that!

It might work for you, I think it depends on your niche and your pricing.