Is Google Base Feed developed completely?

I'm trying to setup my Google base feed, and I have it enabled in opencart. However it only gives me a single URL which is an RSS feed. Google base does not accept an RSS feed, they want .xml. Is this something opencart is still working on? Not sure why it's in opencart if it's not fully developed; please advise. I'm running v1.3.4.

Thank you.

Google base "scheduler" will accept an rss feed.
an rss feed IS xml

You can simply right click any rss page and view source to get the xml-

the Product Feed for Google Base doesn't actually work as far as getting the feed accepted by Google Base. Here's what I had to do to get it to work:

1. Enable the Google Base feed.
2. Find the URL that OpenCart generates (the RSS feed location)
3. Copy and paste that URL in your browser
4. Select View | Page Source
5. Copy and paste into Notepad or such and save as <filename>.xml
6. Use your XML editor or hand-edit the file thusly:
-- remove the quantity tags - you do not need them
-- remove the <g:ups> tags - these are generated incorrectly and will not work
-- edit the <g:weight> tag data value to insert a space between the number and the descriptor (e.g. "10.0 oz" instead of "10.0oz")
7. Save the file and then manually upload it to Google Base. The RSS feed will not work because of the invalid UPC code values passed to Google.

Ideally the Product Feed would give you a chance to map what data gets passed to Google but it does not. I recommend hand-editing the file to get what you want.

The data mapping works sort of like this:
Category --> <g:product-type>
Model --> <g:mpn> = <g:upc>
Weight --> <g:weight>
etc.

So just delete what you don't need/want.

Also because Shopzilla and shopping.com only use txt files and only work for target Country = United States, the RSS feed method won't work without manual intervention.

Google base works fine for me!

jc-piazza wrote: 7. Save the file and then manually upload it to Google Base. The RSS feed will not work because of the invalid UPC code values passed to Google.

It depends on the taxonomy chosen. If you chose Books as the taxonomy, then ISBN would be used instead of upc.
But those are just "Warnings". It shouldn't affect your feed from being listed

yes, agreed. But the upc code problem is not a warning - it is a fatal error.

are you sure? All my UPC errors are warnings

yours looks just like what I got first time, but the product feed was not accepted. I tried without the upc code and it worked immediately. Maybe a bad assumption, but I attributed the difference to the upc tag since that is what I changed. Maybe if I had waited 24 hours like Google says, it might have worked.

In any case, I wanted to edit the other fields since I was not happy with the result direct from OpenCart. (BTW, I really like MS Excel's XML mapping function in Excel 2007.)

On the taxonomy issue referenced in an earlier post, I am approaching this from a dumb user's perspective - I never did this before and only read the instructions available. If there is a setting where you select or describe the taxonomy to be used, I missed that. I don't have books, so it shouldn't need an ISBN, and if you read the google instructions, it says everything has to have either an ISBN or UPC or EAC tag, but it's not true. In my case, there are no UPC codes for some items, and they aren't books, so I don't have/need any of those.

PS - I wrote instructions assuming the process works out of the box (even though it didn't for me) and submitted that as a Contribution - hopefully that can be added to the documentation somehow.

Well the results above are from using my RSS/GBase feed contrib. The way I use taxonomy is statically defined at the topic. The GoogleBase feed looks like it is building the taxonomy from the category level names. But I'm not sure Google accepts any value, maybe it does. I always thought it had to be one of the ones that google offers.

I think the whole upc/isbn thing should be optional all together, but google is oddly finicky about this useless data

Hello,
Can someone tell me how to get to that xml/rss feed? I enabled googlebase on opencart 1.4 and here is that link it produced:
http://www.derm-laser.com/index.php?rou ... oogle_base
but I can't seem to get a page.

I have been using googlebase for some time with other sites doing a manual xml file upload but with this one when I try to create a schedule it gives me this error:
"To schedule a fetch, a valid home page is needed"

Thanks for the help.

I answered a similar posting here. I'd say there needs to be a code fix to ensure only valid xml entities are going through in the feed. I believe that if you check the result that comes from your feed, you'll notice something that causes the xml to be invalid.

EDIT: I just did a quick check of the link you provide and it's returning a '404 Not Found' html status response. Have you disabled the feed now? I was going to check it for invalid xml.

COUPLE OF THINGS
1. i love the RSS feed. It works great except for the following....
2. How do you get your product to show up with FREE SHIPPING on Google Base? I have set the weight to zero and selected NO on requires shipping and it still won't show up on the FREE SHIPPING section of Google Shopping
3. is the SKU the UPC code or is it the Model #? Or where do you enter the UPC code??
4. All my google base products have missing identifiers Missing gtin. how do i fix this???

I also have some questions too:
5. For only _ONE_ of my items, google bumps out with a "can't have description in the description" (which I don't). It's like it is picking up a tag.
6. It would be nice if the URLs supplied to google base were the SEO URLs to improve the search results.
7. As for #3 above, it would be awesome to get a key for which fields end up where OCField -> GoogleBase Field. It seems right now the Model # is being placed as the UPC, which isn't that bad, but I really don't want UPC numbers displayed on the product pages. Also, what do we do when our products don't have UPC numbers?

P.S. This is SO much better than uploading a text file once a month!

http://best4men.com/index.php?route=feed/google_base


Prohibited word in attribute: description (1 error)
Item Nr. Line Nr.
20 153

Item Warnings - 1 items with warnings 1 items affected
Invalid UPC value (1 warning)

Please make sure the value is a valid UPC value.
Item Nr. Line Nr. Value
20 167 Best4Men - Men's Shave Kit

Hi Guys,
I'm having a similar problem with the invalid UPC value,

however when i go to data quality tab on the left - it comes up as saying "Your item list contains invalid product identifiers. Please submit valid identifiers."

and when i go and view my products here:
http://www.google.com/products?authorid=xxxxxxx

nothing appears


I have put it through this xml validator http://www.xmlvalidation.com/index.php?id=1&L=0
and it comes back as saying "Content is not allowed in prolog."

I put it through another validator and it comes up with this:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http% ... oogle_base

Any ideas

thanks
P

could anyone else shed some light on this please?

thanks