E-Commerce

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Christmas is coming, and thousands of people will be searching Froogle for gift ideas. More than that, I've found that placement of my products in Froogle tends to improve my product page ranking in Google Search. Even though uploading your products to Froogle/Google Base is a hassle the first time you do it, I strongly believe that it's worth the time spent by you or your web tech.

However, submitting products to Froogle has changed in the last few months. Now all products are submitted via Google Base -- with some important changes from the previous Froogle specs in fields required, field names, and formatting. To begin, go to Google Base (www.google.com/base/), login to your Google account, or create a new account at no charge.

Google has outlined its several step process reasonably clearly. If you have just a few products -- fewer than 10 -- you may be better off submitting them one-by-one rather than creating a bulk submit file. In my situation, I have about 50 products, so the bulk submit makes lots of sense -- especially since product submissions expire after 31 days and the submission must be repeated.

An increasing number of shopping cart programs and order management systems (or third party add-ons) make Froogle submissions easily, based on the existing product database. (Hopefully, these vendors have now updated their systems from the former Froogle submission standard to accommodate the new requirements of the Google Base bulk submission.) If your e-commerce system doesn't include this feature, you'll need to do the bulk submission yourself.

For do-it-yourselfers, the key is to have an up-to-date product database, which you may be able to export from your shopping cart program. I spent most of an afternoon updating my out-of-date product database using Microsoft Access, which has an easy data entry form, but you could do this in Microsoft Excel nearly as easily. Incidentally, the notes that follow are designed to explain the fields briefly and illustrate them so you get the idea -- they're not designed to be comprehensive since Google Base offers clear, precise definitions and formats for each allowable data field. Here are the fields (or attributes) Google Base requires for product submissions:

After I carefully set up the database, I used the Export feature and selected a tab-delimited file. I was careful to "include Field Names on First Row" so that Google Base can see the field names. Google also allows several XML formats -- RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, and Atom 1.0. I could have used Word's Mail Merge feature to produce an XML file, but I found it substantially easier in my situation to export to a tab-delimited text file.

Google's step-by-step process is: (1) select item type (I chose "products"), (2) create bulk upload (described above), (3) register bulk upload (tell Google the file name), and (4) submit bulk upload. For smaller files Google makes it easy to upload using your web browser; for larger product files use FTP.

The bulk submission upload process goes pretty fast for smaller files -- my 50-product file was uploaded and processed within a minute or two. But then the pain began. Google Base validates all the data after it is uploaded. If there are errors, some or all of your product records may be rejected. On my first few attempts I had errors in the date and shipping formats. I also received an error when one of the products I submitted was on a different domain than the one I had registered with Google. Oops! I fixed the errors and resubmitted -- but it didn't take! Scream! Google Base only accepts one upload per hour, so I had to wait an hour to see if my error fixes were adequate. It "took" on the second try. Whew!

I've walked you through the process so you can see what's involved. Yes, it's a hassle -- the first time. However, subsequent monthly updates (remember, products expire every 31 days by default) should go pretty smoothly once you get the hang of it. If you're serious about selling online, a Froogle/Google Base submission is worth doing to improve rankings, increase search engine traffic, and receive direct product page visits from Froogle searches. Put this on your definite "to do" list.