"What are ITEM FEEDS and how can they help me ?"

Would you like to...

Print this page

Email this page

Post a comment

User Opinions

No users have voted.

---

How would you rate this answer?

Helpful

Not helpful

Thank you for rating this answer.

Short Answer:

Item feeds are a powerful and flexible way of integrating your store with 3-rd party shopping search engines, product comparison search engines, and other specialized systems.  Some of these may include Google Products, Yahoo Shopping, MSN Shopping, Nextag, Pricegrabber, Pricescan, Shopping.com, MySimon, BizRate. and more.  Each of these engines have their own special format, so you may find that our shopping cart software is not compatible with all engines previously mentioned.  You may find that it works with many more than are mentioned as well. Most of these shopping search engines charge fees, such as $0.25 per item, with the exception of Google Products (formerly Froogle), which is free.

Detailed Explanation:

Each of these shopping search engines have different formats that they want your items list in, as well as the way you can send your products to them.  For example, Google Products allows you to FTP your product list to them.  The shopping cart can automate this process for you, saving you lots of time to work on your store.  Pricegrabber does not allow FTP, so you will see in your item feeds that you can download a file, which you can then take and manually upload via their control panel.

We do not provide direct support for integrating with these 3rd party search engines, but you will find tools in the shopping cart manager such as the ability to test the FTP connection. You will see that by default we may have a few engines listed. They are not active by default, so you will need to go through and enable as well as configure them. Please see the related questions below for example(s).

Over time, as more engines are tested by our users, we will add them to our archive.

Once you have setup a feed, you can then exclude specific items from showing up on specific feeds. When you are editing an item, you will see a list of your feeds. Simply dragging over the item will exclude it from a feed. This might be necessary for example if you find that certain items do not perform well, or not cost effective, in some of the shopping search engines.

You may find that this feature can accomplish other tasks besides just the shopping search engines. Currently, this feature will not work for more than a few thousand products.