On February 20th, the FeedPerfect Team will release powerful new functionality to better support recent changes to Google Product Search.
As you know, Google introduced a new Google Product Category (aka GPC) late last year. There were several major changes at the Google end which have provided FeedPerfect with opportunities for improving our service.
Download Feed Files
In order to facilitate better testing, FeedPerfect will now allow you to download your actual Feed file after a successful validation.
Category Required Attributes
Depending on how you categorize your product catalog, some attributes may or may not be required. For example, if submitting products to the Apparel & Accessories GPC and it’s sub-categories, gender, age group, size and color are required in the US. At this time Apparel & Accessories is the only category which requires the fields to be populated. In anticipation of more category level requirements, FeedPerfect has been updated to reject/and report back validation failures at the category level.
This means that beginning on February 20th, if you are submitting products to Apparel and Accessories, FeedPerfect will show you the errors when gender, age group, size or color are missing on a product. These changes were made to help provide you with the best tool possible to meet the Data Quality requirements outlined by Google Product Search.
In addition, our validation system has been updated to allow for easier changes within the FeedPerfect product in the future. The new flexibility behind the scenes will allow the FeedPerfect Team to match validation as required by more Shopping Engines more quickly. As you know, these can change frequently and vary across each Shopping Engine.
Google Product Variant Support*
FeedPerfect has also been updated with some easy to use mapping tools to facilitate the automated creation and submission of Product Variants from the options within your Yahoo or Solid Cactus eCommerce stores!
Google Product Search supports Variants when a product is sold on your store with options on the product page. Google strongly encourages submitting Variants whenever possible and requires that you submit Variants when submitting to Apparel & Accessories.
The new Product Variant Mapping tools will greatly simplify the efforts needed to submit Variants to most Google Product Categories.
Google Unique Image Requirements Per Variation
Currently, Apparel & Accessories has stricter requirements than other Google Product Categories when submitting Product Variants. For Apparel merchants, Google requires unique images for each valid Product Variation when submitting Product Variants. Google encourages unique images for Product Variants in other Google Product Categories, but they are still recommended.
The new Product Variant Mapping section of FeedPerfect will automatically generate unique images URLs for Apparel & Accessories based on settings that you provide. If you do have unique images for products in non-Apparel categories FeedPerfect will allow you the option to use them, or bypass and submit the main product image for each variation.
For details on how to begin taking advantage of this powerful new tool visit help.feedperfect.com.
The FeedPerfect Team
*Not available on Starter plan accounts.