What is a Product Feed? Need for Froogle and Yahoo Shopping.

[lorenbaker]

In order to list my products on Froogle or Yahoo shopping I need to develop feeds. What kind of feeds are these? XML?

Where can I find more information on them?

How are they created?

Any help with this info would be much appreciated.

Cheers,
Loren

[Dreamquick]

If you follow the "information for merchants" link on the homepage you get taken to here; specifically #4 "How do I submit a data feed?"

[froogle.google.com...]

If you would like to submit a data feed of your store's product catalog to Froogle, please complete and submit this form. After we receive the form, we will send you further instructions.

The data feed will need to be in a tab-delimited file; we will send you a more detailed description. You will be able to upload it daily, weekly, or monthly.

So in summary ... fill in the form and then they will tell you more, until then all you get to know is that it's a tab delimited text file.

- Tony

[snookie]

Any idea when we can expect a UK version of Froogle? It would have been nice to have a one for xmas, still they missed the boat now...

[hannamyluv]

We now have about 7 feeds that we send to various places of all formats (even XML). We do it all with nothing more than excel and notepad. Super easy. I have to laugh everytime someplace calls offering to do the feeds for us for a fee. You'd think it was brain surgery or something.

[sun818]

Yeah, its pretty easn't isn't it? Once you get the hang of it, its just a matter of matching the correct fields in your database to the ones the receipient wants. Froogle requirement is very basic compared to what some of the other sites want.

Some of script repositories provide free feed generators for Froogle.

[Compworld]

Also, note that they will not accept affiliate marketers for Froogle (which I personally think is stupid, but then again I do not do affiliate marketing). In order to qualify for their service, you MUST sell the products on site at fixed prices.

CompWorld

[mquarles]

Compworld,

I think the concern is the clutter factor. If I am only looking to buy something, and comparison shopping, an affiliate truly adds no value if I would otherwise find the company with whom they are affiliating.

This is different than with pure SERPs, where affiliates often add value because of things they are offering on their sites other than the "buy" link.

MQ

[Compworld]

Yes, but different affiliate sites have better reputations than others, and might even have it for a cheaper price. Additionally, the affiliate might have a better reputation than the source. Please keep in mind that sites like Amazon, Bluefly, and Smart Bargains also have affiliate programs, and their prices might be better than other merchants. I just feel that it should not be Google decision on what we want to look at. It should be open ended with no discrimination against affiliates. To my knowledge, they are the only ones that do this.

CompWorld

[sun818]

I hope Froogle keeps it to businesses that ship their own products or have it drop shipped from a fulfillment house.

[Chndru]

Given the service is primarily US (as of now), with a zipcode input, displaying the seller's recommended total price (price + shipping + tax) would be wicked cool.

is that too difficult to achieve with the data feed?

[sun818]

PriceGrabber and mySimon already do this. Their data feed requirements are also more complex.

[Joe_Jordan]

What other sites accept feeds for products, similar to Froogle? Since I already did the Froogle feed, might as well use it on other sites too. :)

[hannamyluv]

You can easily set up feeds for shopping.com, bizrate, yahoo shopping, alta vista, Inktomi and Nextag. That who we are with right now. We use the same basic info, we just set up the different formats in excel templates and paste the info in.

[sun818]

> paste the info in

From where? Microsoft Access?

[hannamyluv]

We do a data dump into a .csv file. You could do a data dump into an access file as well, it would work.