boomhauer wrote:also, im curious if a live provider might be built...
From about v1.8 [I think?], there is a froogle.ashx file that produces a feed dynamically so you can [as I do] set base/merchant to check for a daily/weekly/monthly feed.
This is something I've done from way back before using nop, [and have an unpublished blog about it that seems a bit superfluous now] and have added this feature to earlier nop builds that use the export style feed with success.
I'll revisit my blog, get my code from an earlier nop version (although if you grab newer source and port it, it should be fairly simple to do), update it all, publish it and hopefully it may help somebody who has the trauma of manually uploading feeds.
Now about the current export library and google merchant. I've noticed that Google, in tha name of improvement, have managed to make a few of my nop sites disappear from base/shopping. This is obviously related to internal changes at google and their way of processing feeds.
One thing that is important but often overlooked in some e-commerce sites is the relationship between the product and the keyword. Where this relationship becomes more significant is in places such as Google Merchant Centre, where the mechanism of finding matching products to searches is all keyword driven.
Take a look at most well organised e-commerce sites, and they are based on an hierarchical structure of categories, sub categories and products that paint the whole picture of a product. If you look at a single product in isolation, this can often reflect a very specific product identifier as a 'keyword' that is obscure or irrelevant. This means the product is lost or performs poorly in [google base] searches.
Now if you take that same product and reflect its 'name' based on its hierarchy (like a concatenated breadcrumb), the product becomes more meaningful and will perform better.
So, what do we do about it?
Well, as mentioned above, uncommenting the additional product_type reference works to an extent, but it is essentially pointless for most sites, as it only permits a single type to be reflected.
If you read
http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=160081 for some more details about the product_type attribute and taxonomy, it seems likely that, without too much work, we can use those categories we painstakingly added to our site to reflect a reasonable hierarchy for our product type.
To take this a step further, we could easily add a 'taxonomy' field to the category class to reflect this requirement and write that out to the froogle feed.
And to go even further, given that the article above suggests we can extend the taxonomy, we could add the Google defaults in a drop down, then rely on the category name or add our own text field to append to the product_type so we don't break the nop Categories.
Remember, the product_type is item specific, not feed specific.
I am working on creating some better 'title' attributes on a [nop] site this week, so I might also add a Google product_type selector and/or field in there, so we can play the Google game a little better?
As usual, I'll probably be really slack at documenting anything I do in a meaningful way, but if anyone finds this useful or has any comments, please let me know.
Ed.
