nikhilrajr, are you talking about Google Shopping, or about organic search?
It sounds like you're talking about organic search, but that you are wanting the control of Google Shopping. My comments below are for organic search, where, last time I looked, you cannot tag products as in or out of stock in a way that would be seen by Googlebot.
Organic search results simply can't give you the control of a Google Shopping feed, at least not as you've described.
Re organic... just some general notes, not specifically addressing all details of your plan, but I hope enough of them to give you some ideas... Again, this is for organic, not for Shopping results.
In my experience, trying to control what appears in Google's organic index with XML sitemaps would be a real crapshoot, as you have no control about how or when Google will rank or index you.
Additionally, Google's results aren't fresh enough for search to show what's in and out of stock on a geo-location basis and at a given point in time.
Systems that depend on IP and a periodic query to a central inventory database (which is the way some chains handle this), are, in my experience, often inadequate for the following reasons...
- an IP used to determine search location can't determine what store in, say, a metro area the searcher might want to shop at.
- periodic inventories depend on how often the inventories are made. Once-a-day, eg, which is how many ecommerce chains with retail outlets do it, may well not be frequent enough if your stocks are low.
On retail ecommerce, an often-used solution would be to have the customer (once on the site) enter a zip code and a radius, and then manually check stores in the results presented... and you'd use whatever inventory control system you've chosen when the customer asks about availability. .
Long ago, I worked with a retail food operation where everything was bar-coded, including even local deliveries, so information provided to users could be very current. Note, though, that this does not interact with organic search, and is a very expensive system to set up.
In a sense, your plan C, a database including both locations A & B, is closest to the above, though it sounds unlikely that you use barcoding... and organic search is not affected. But at least your largest possible inventory is what the user is querying (not on Google, but on your site).
If you have really different multiple catalogs, for organic search, you might consider separate sites that incorporate location names. You'd still have the in and out of stock situation, but the user-experience is likely to be better. Some large chains do this, but more on the level of what appliances they stock... not on grocery inventory.
I'd also say it would be a bad user experience for users not to see your inventory situation until they are checking out.
Note that we have a separate subforum for Google Shopping here [
webmasterworld.com...]
