Googlebase requirements
From the 22nd of September Google are making several changes to the requirements for Google shopping results.
If you would like to control your own Google base account you are more than welcome. We can not offer any support beyond this guide if you decide to create your own account.
The vast majority of information is already included automatically through the normal use of ekmPowershop, from this page the top 3 items are already included just by creating a product;
http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=188494
1. Basic Product Information: Attributes to describe the basic information about your products, such as title, description and type of product.
2. Availability & Price: Attributes to specify the availability and prices of your listings.
3. Unique Product Identifiers: Attributes to ensure your products appear on the right product page such as brands, UPCs and EANs
In order to add all the information for point 3 however you will need to add the “product attributes” feature of Powershop under the features section of your account. Once you have installed this you will be presented with this.
Google requires that at least 2 out of 'brand', 'gtin' and 'mpn' must be included, although if possible all 3 should be included. In all cases except media any 2 of the 3 will do, but Google states;
“For media (such as books, films, music and video games), you must submit the 'gtin' attribute, but we recommend that you include 'brand' and 'mpn' if available”
Therefore gtin is mandatory for Media and you should include the other 2 if you can. For all other categories you just need to include at least any 2 of the 3.
Assiging the attributes
The simplest way of assigning this information is to simply choose which fields you wish to include on the feature pages and the edit any given product, the attributes will appear at the top of the edit product page like this.
Simply type the information into the relevant boxes and click update at the bottom to save the changes. These attributes will then be included in the feed that is generated the following day.
Importing the information
Important - Do not use this method if you are using variants with different images applied to each variant.
It is very simple to use the import system to assign this information to your products but we do not recommend using the import system to assign this information to any products with variants. Any items with variants on will require that you add the information in manually as per the below.
If you do not have variants however then assigning this information is very straight forward. To start with add the import/export feature and go to export your products. Select to export all categories and on the next page click “deselect all” to untick all the attributes. Now tick the attributes you do want to import and click next;
By exporting only the bear minimum we are reducing the chances of errors occurring in other parts of the data.
Now we have the spreadsheet before us simply fill in the details in the relevant columns for each product. Once this is done just set the action column to “edit product” all the way down and save the sheet. Go back to import/export, choose “import to file”, use browse to select to your file then select to import the file. If all goes to plan we shouldn’t get any errors showing up and when viewing items the attributes should be included in the section at the top of the edit product page.
If there are any issues then a restore point is created and that is available for 3 hours after the import, just go back to features > import/export and the restore option will be visible there.
Variants
As mentioned above you CANNOT use the import system to assign this information to variants, although Google is getting big on variants now so we need to make sure these are included correctly in your feeds;
Product Variants: Attributes to correctly describe variations of a product that only differ by colour, material, pattern or size.
Google have specific fields for colour, size, pattern and material. If your site has a variant assigned that's named any of those four items exactly we'll then format them automatically into the format that Google wants. If you have any variants that aren't any of those we'll just submit that as normal, with the variant appended to the product name. If you have set your variant name to something called say 'Pick what colour you want' we wouldn't be able to recognise that, only variant with those exact names will be submitted as variants.
Another key consideration here is the image of the variants. If you are submitting say a ball which can be red or green then the green variant must have a green picture assigned to it or it will be rejected.
As mentioned above the import system will not work properly if you have different images assigned to different variants so we need to assign all of these manually. Firstly just edit your product and scroll down to the variants section and click edit next to the variant;
As you can see here we have the ability to assign all the attributes to each variant, each variant is basically a mini product.
Using these pages you can assign individual images and attributes to each variant.
Clothing items
Clothing Products: Attributes to describe clothing products such as colour or gender.
In order to meet these requirements you will need to enable the product classification feature. Once installed you can see this;
The ebay classifications can be disabled unless you intend to export items to an ebay. Enable the classification for Google and then go to edit a product, you will see this;
At the moment it is only required for clothing although over time more classifications will be added and more than likely they will become mandatory. The list of classifications is merely pulled from Google so if there is no classification suitable for your items don’t worry, there may be more down the line.
Google have now added the following classifications.
- Clothing & Accessories > Shoes
- Clothing & Accessories (Note that submitting this value for clothing and * shoes is not acceptable.)
- Media > Books
- Media > DVDs & Films
- Media > Music
- Software > Video Game Software
Summary of Attribute Requirements
http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?answer=1344057
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