On Saturday, April 21st Solid Cactus will be performing server maintenance which will affect your Feed Perfect account. Maintenance is scheduled between 2AM and 5AM EST.

During this time, you will not be able to access your FeedPerfect account.

Please plan ahead to make any feed changes relevant for the weekend by Friday. Scheduled publishing will proceed Friday night and resume on Sunday night.

These upgrades are routine, and are necessary to ensure the highest standard of performance for your account.

We appreciate your business and support.

The FeedPerfect Team

Officially, Google Product Search has not made the new GPC required on all categories. The Feed Perfect Team has seen numerous warnings and errors this week in Google Product Search despite the “optional” condition.

At this time, the Feed Perfect Team has made the GPC required on all categories. This has been done to prevent further warnings and errors within your Google Product Search account. While we realize that your feed may temporarily fail to submit, it has become necessary to fail products from Google feeds missing the GPC at this time.

In addition, the Google categories have been updated.

Products that do not have a GPC will now fail validation in FeedPerfect in order to offset any potential Data Quality issues for our merchants.

There are multiple ways to assign a Google Product Category to your products within FeedPerfect.

The first way would be to set a default Google product category for all of your products. You can do this via the category tree located within the channel settings for “Google shopping – us”. Simply click edit on the feed and select a Google product category for ALL of your products. Don’t forget to save your changes!

If you sell a variety of different products and one default Google Product Category is not sufficient, you can assign separate Google Product Categories using the tools located within the Product catalog tab.

Once you click on the product catalog tab you will see categorization / cpc on the left nav. Underneath this header you are presented with two options for categorizing your products. You can select to either map your store categories to Google product categories or map your individual products to Google product categories.

Once you have successfully added a Google product category to all of you products we recommend validating the feed from the Channel Settings. As always, you can manually publish or wait for your next scheduled publish to push the changes to Google.

The FeedPerfect Team

Google Product Variant Support

FeedPerfect has 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, Solid Cactus eCommerce, or 1SC store!

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.

Product Variant Mapping is available on FeedPerfect Lite, Professional and Enterprise packages.

*To upgrade your Starter account and get access to this great new tool, as well as 2 more feeds follow the instructions here.

The FeedPerfect Team has made several changes to ensure better pre-validation before your feeds are submitted to Google Product Search in the US.

The Team has added category required fields to the following Categories.

These changes will prevent products with missing information from being submitted to Google if they are mapped to these categories. This has been done to provide better Data Quality before your feed reaches Google. If your products are not mapped to these categories, the respective fields are still optional. If your products are missing these field values when submitting to Apparel, you should set default values as soon as possible.

Google Product Search US would likely reject your feed without these values. The new validation will simply mirror Google’s more strict Apparel requirements.

Should you be missing the value for the field, FeedPerfect will display the product within your Channel Validation Results with the message “Field is empty the value of the Feed Column (“size”) should not be empty. Product ID is 2″.

Google Product Category

Required for the following Categories:

Apparel & Accessories and all sub-categories

brand

Required for Apparel & Accessories and all sub-categories

If you have products mapped to Apparel & Accessories (or any other child category of Apparel & Accessories) and the product does not have a value for brand the product will fail to submit and return the error “Field is empty the value of the Feed Column (“brand”) should not be empty. Product ID is 2″

gender

Required for Apparel & Accessories and all sub-categories

If you have products mapped to Apparel & Accessories (or any other child category of Apparel & Accessories) and the product does not have a value for gender the product will fail to submit and return the error “”Field is empty the value of the Feed Column (“gender”) should not be empty. Product ID is 2″

age group

Required for Apparel & Accessories and all sub-categories

If you have products mapped to Apparel & Accessories (or any other child category of Apparel & Accessories) and the product does not have a value for age group the product will fail to submit and return the error “Field is empty the value of the Feed Column (“age group”) should not be empty. Product ID is 2″

color

Required for Apparel & Accessories and all sub-categories

If you have products mapped to Apparel & Accessories  (or any other child category of Apparel & Accessories) and the product does not have a value for color the product will fail to submit and return the error “Field is empty the value of the Feed Column (“color”) should not be empty. Product ID is 2″

size

Required for Apparel & Accessories > Clothing and all sub-categories

Required for Apparel & Accessories > Shoes and all sub-categories

If you have products mapped to Apparel & Accessories > Clothing and the product does not have a value for size or a default value for size in your feed mappings the product will fail to submit and return the error “Field is empty the value of the Feed Column (“size”) should not be empty. Product ID is 2″

If size is empty on products mapped to Apparel & Accessories > Handbags, the product will still submit as size is not required on that category.

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.

Shopping.com recently made a change that will have Rejected all of your products, resulting in your products getting removed from the Live Listings. In addition to making sure you are using the correct version and the correct fields in FeedPerfect (see Shopping.com Feed Spec Changes), you will need to login to your Shopping.com account and relist your products. To do this, simply login to your Shopping.com account. Click “List Products” under Product Listings. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the button labeled “Almost there! Map datafeed columns”. Lastly scroll to the bottom of the page again and click “continue”. This will update your listings within Shopping and get your products live again.

Shopping.com has announced new feed specifications that will be enforced on 9/1/11.

Stock Availability will now be a required field. We will make this a required field in Feed Perfect beginning on 8/31/11.

The following fields will be not be supported after 9/1 and will be removed from Feed Perfect:

Subcategory Name, Style, Department, Sport or Activity, Team, League, Fan Gear Type, Software Category, Cell Phone Type, Cell Phone Usage Profile, Height Unit of Measure, Product Height, Width Unit of Measure, Product Width, Length Unit of Measure, Product Length.

If you are currently submitting a feed to Shopping.com, please switch to the new version Shopping.com v3.21 as soon as possible to ensure your listings stay active.

As you may know Google has changed the requirements to the Google Product Search Feed Specification and Policies. One of these significant changes is the addition of the Google Product Category field. This new attribute contains the category of the product according to Google’s product taxonomy.  Google Product Category will be required for all items that belong to the “Apparel and Accessories”, “Media”, and “Software” categories. It is also highly recommended for all other categories.

You can now categorize your items for Google in Feed Perfect.

If you are already submitting the “product type” attribute, please continue to do so. Google Product Category is included in addition to, not as a replacement for the product type attribute. The difference between the two is that product type attribute contains the category of the product according to your taxonomy and Google Product Type contains the category of the product according to Google’s product taxonomy.

If you have any questions about this, or anything related to the Comparison Shopping Search Engines, please feel free to email us feedperfectblog@solidcactus.com.

If you’re thinking about expanding your Comparison Shopping Engine activity, or just want to get into a new marketing channel, Amazon Product Ads is now opening up to more categories, and when you click on our link here, you’ll get started with $75 in free clicks. Amazon Product Ads is Amazon’s cost per click comparison shopping engine. The general difference between Amazon Product Ads and the Amazon Marketplace is that with the Marketplace the shopper’s entire buying process, from search to purchase, stays on Amazon. However, with Amazon Product Ads a shopper finds your product on Amazon, clicks on a product ad and then is directed to your web store where they can purchase your product. As with any cost per click Comparison Shopping Engine, when you put attention in and use better tools to manage your Amazon Product account, you’ll see better results.

Recently, Amazon Product Ads have opened up their category restrictions. They are now accepting product ads in the following categories: Baby, Computers, Electronics, Grocery, Health & Beauty, Home, Home Improvement, Jewelry, Musical Instruments, Office, Pet Supplies, Shoes, Sports, Toys and Watches. If you’d like to try out Amazon Product ads, sign up by clicking on our link and Amazon Product Ads will start you off with $75 in free clicks.

The Google Merchant Center has made some changes yet again. Some of these additions will be required, while others will only help your data’s quality.

You can find their press release about it here: http://googlemerchantblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/important-changes-to-google-product.html

Summary:
These changes will take place on 9/22/11.

• A New Google Product Category – This is a new attribute field they’ve added in addition (separate from) to the google product type attribute.
• An Image for every product – One image is now required for every item, and Google can now accept up to 10 additional images per item.
• Availability is now required – Google will now accept your item even if its out of stock.
• Apparel Category – There are some changes to the apparel / clothes category where google is now asking that you include attributes like Size, Color, Gender, and Age Group for any item that comes in variations. IE Shoes that come in multiple colors.
• Google will be checking feeds for accuracy and have noted they will be taking action against accounts that violate their standards. The basic part I took from this is that the price advertised on the CSE needs to be the price on the page.
• Feedperfect is currently being updated to accept these changes.

If you have any questions about this, or anything related to CSEs please feel free to email me. feedperfectblog@gmail.com