A quick question about the feed. All of my products expired a few days ago. I went from having almost 15k products in my Google Merchant feed to 0 this morning.

I am still learning about the feed (obviously). Is there an expiration date on all products in the feed, or does Google do this on their own? I downloaded the GMerchLister again, saved it as gbase and re-uploaded it to Google, hoping they will accept it.

Am I supposed to upload the feed every 30 days (or so)?
Is there an expiration date on all of the products that I can change in the file?
Or is there a potential problem with the feed, etc that caused all of the products to expire?

Hi,

If you manually upload your feed it will expire automatically so you will need to go into your merchant center and visit:
Product > Feeds
then click on the feed in question and you should see Re-Process Feed in the top right.

Clicking this will refresh your existing feed to prevent the products expiring.
No need to re-upload if there are no changes to your product listing.

We had to do this when we first started using shopping a few years back and there were occasions when we forgot to they expired.
I seem to remember the shopping admin notifications do not cover this so there is no reminder from Google.

The feed now sits on our server and Google fetches it every day so it solves the expiry issue.

Regards,
David

Thanks David

I see now that Google automatically expires the (upload) feed in 30 days. When you're not paying attention and you wonder why your sales slowed down tremendously, then figure out almost 15,000 products are gone from your Google feed (which feeds Bing as well). I really need to start paying more attention to details.

One thing I've learned over the years, never assume everything is going smoothly just because it appears to be going smoothly. Things of this nature have a tenancy to change on their own. Always check, double check, triple check and check some more!

Thanks for the help!

I am having a major issue with my Google Merchant feed. My product descriptions are downloading as just a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. Everything else seems to be ok, but the product descriptions are all showing as "hfdiuwe$@bhj" and similar.

I reeaaallly would like to fix this ASAP. I've contacted Mike @ DLSS and am waiting to hear back from him. In the meantime...any ideas?

Are the products all showing ok on the store still? Could you post a couple of lines from the feed here?

Vince

Click Here for Shopping Cart Software
Click Here to sign up for our newsletter
Click Here for the latest updater

Hi Vince,

Mike is working on the feed now. It appears there may be an issue with the database connection within the feed. I have an ASP website with an SQL database. Apparently part of the problem consists of this issue:

"Microsoft SQL Server Native Client 11.0 error '80004005'
TCP Provider: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host."

Hopefully we can get this figured out really soon. With 17k+ products the merchant feed is an absolute necessity.

Thanks to Mike @ DLSS and Matt @ Servelink, the issue with my Google Merchant feed has been resolved. My product descriptions were not downloading with the gbase.xml file. The problem then progressed to an inability to download the feed at all due to the database connection string. I have a Windows (ASP) website with a SQL database.

I am just placing this here in case anyone runs into this issue in the future. This needs to be added to the database connection code (vsadmin/db_conn_open.asp) in order for the gbase.xml to download correctly. (Atleast it did in my case)

DataTypeCompatibility=80;MARS Connection=True;

Thank you Mike and Matt for going the extra mile on this one.

Just a quick question about the Google Product Feed

I just changed several hundred products to Back Order only, and removed the sell button on several hundred others. I am not sure if this will be temporary or long term at this point. I am wondering if Back Order and "Notify when back in stock" items are included in the DLSS product feed when it is uploaded to GMC (per my monthly feed update)?

I'm asking because I wouldn't want to pay a ppc fee for these particular products via my Performance Max and Shopping campaigns.

quote:

---

I am wondering if Back Order and "Notify when back in stock" items are included in the DLSS product feed when it is uploaded to GMC (per my monthly feed update)?

---

They should not, but really this would be a question for Mike as he is the developer of that one.
Personally I would just open the file on my computer and search for one of the product ID's to confirm.
Being somewhat familiar with that script, I am pretty sure if the sell button is unticked, it does not get included with the export.

Thanks,
David

Thanks David, that is a good idea. It just occurred to me also that I can search products in my GMC account via Filter > Item ID. I searched for several of the products that do not have Sell button checked, and they are showing in my GMC account, and are showing as In Stock. This may be due to a change that I had Mike make to my list some time ago to show all product as In Stock at all times. I was having an issue with in stock products showing as out of stock, so Mike was kind enough to make this change to my script.

I suppose I can try to uncheck the Display button, re-upload and see if that works. I was hoping to display the products and have users click the "Notify when back in stock" button, yet not have the products attached to my product list so that I am not paying to advertise products that are not currently available.

Really Google is becoming more and more automated with regards to ecommerce products.
I actually have two feeds - One for paid (advertising) products and one for free ads as some time back Google opened up free product ads that will not show as often as paid ads.
Of my 10,000+ products, I only feed in about 1/3 of them between the two feeds.
But Google recently notified me that they will begin loading all of my products into the free feed, with the exception of my items that I want to show paid ads for.

They also know quite well what products are in stock, based off the schema data collected from my pages, so if a product goes out of stock before I upload a new feed, they know, and take action, without penalty.

In the end, it may not be a big deal if you are feeding products that are out of stock as Google should see it in short order, and take action.
With that said, I would also feel uneasy about feeding products into paid ads and that out of stock, so you might want to look closely at your feed and contact Mike if you see the out of stock items are being dumped into the feed.

Thanks,
David

Thanks David. I just emailed Mike to see if he can provide any assistance on this. I think it is the custom addition to my feed (all products in stock at all times) that seems to be overriding the product availability via Google page crawls. It hasn't been an issue until I very recently edited approximately 700 products to render them unavailable. This is causing me to pay high PPC clicks for products that are not currently available for purchase. I could also go through each unavailable product in my GMC account and change it from In Stock to Out of Stock, but that would take a decent amount of time. Hopefully there's an easier way...

I have replied to your email Tim.

Mike Beebe
President,
DataLinks Software Solutions
www.dlss.ca
Rate Me Here

ASP and PHP mods - www.dlss.ca/products.asp
A Tremendous Home - www.ATremendousHome.com
Cigar Smoke Shop - www.CigarSmokeShop.net

Mike,

Thanks again for your help. All is well now with the feed. I appreciate your time!

Is there a changelog for this add-on? Do I need to re-purchase for PHP8 compatibility?

We are seeing this error message in log after PHP8 upgrade

Array and string offset access syntax with curly braces is no longer supported in /home/xxx/public_html/GMerchLister.php on line 345

Thanks

CVW Web Design
www.cvwdesign.co.uk | web design and development

Clive,

Send me an email, and we will rectify this. On a second note this is the ASP forum.

Mike Beebe
President,
DataLinks Software Solutions
www.dlss.ca
Rate Me Here

ASP and PHP mods - www.dlss.ca/products.asp
A Tremendous Home - www.ATremendousHome.com
Cigar Smoke Shop - www.CigarSmokeShop.net