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Live Product Upload and Image Hosting

Pricing

Welcome to the Live Product Upload and Image Hosting beta program. Until further notice, image hosting services will be provided at no charge. Pricing for submissions to Live.com and generating the data feed file will be the same as for Google Base data feeds. The charge for image hosting is tentatively set to $0.05 per day, or about $1.50 per month. Because of limitations of Live.com, image hosting service is currently required for submitting to them.

Image Hosting

Image hosting is actually a redirection service, and copies of your images are not stored on our servers. For this and other reasons, it can not function as a backup service. Image URLs will have the following format:

http://ih.atensoftware.com/FeedId/OfferId.jpg

Our system actually ignores the file extension, so ending the URL with .gif, .png, etc will still redirect to the same image hosted at Yahoo. Image hosting data is refreshed on an hourly basis, ensuring that your store's latest image URLs will be accessible.

Image hosting can be enabled from the "Advanced Settings" section of the "Modify Feed" page, and is independent of submission frequency. It may take up to an hour for the hosted image URLs to become active.

Live Product Upload

Live Product Upload is a free service provided by Microsoft's MSN Live. It allows online merchants to list their products in the new products.live.com shopping search engine. To submit your catalog to them, please follow the directions below.

  1. Sign up for a free merchant account at http://productupload.live.com.
    1. Create a new Catalog
    2. Choose Google-base compatible format (.txt)
    3. Choose Upload using FTP
    4. Set the file name to live.txt (or something similar with a .txt extension).
    5. Set up an FTP username/password under FTP settings
  2. Log into your Aten account
    1. Go to the Modify Feed page for your existing Google feed, and click Create Copy
    2. Click Modify the New Feed
    3. Change the Store Name to something like YourStoreNameHere-Live.com
    4. Set the FTP server to ftp.productupload.live.com
    5. Set the FTP username, FTP password, and file name to match what you entered in live.com.
    6. Click the Show Advanced Options button.
    7. Enable Image Hosting
    8. Set the File Enclosure property to None
    9. Make any other changes, and then save the feed.
  3. Run your first submission from the Submit a Processing Request page
  4. Wait for the status to appear in live.com

Microsoft's Live Product Search is a Beta product. Therefore, bugs, downtime, delays, and slow technical support from their site may reasonably be expected.

Issue with Large Catalogs

MSN Live ProductUpload currently has an issue handling very large files. You may see an error in our system like "Error uploading to the FTP server. You can not overwrite a recently uploaded file. Allow 48 hours for the file to process. E_WARNING: ftp_put(): Transfer complete but post processing FAILED. 43554763 bytes transferred. 2419709 bps.".

Even if it uploads successfully, it may show as "processing" forever in MSN Live Product Upload. MSN has advised to split the catalog into smaller sized files, and uploading the files one at a time. They should resolve this issue in their next release. Our system doesn't support splitting the catalog automatically, and that would have to be done manually with a text editor after downloading it from the Download Feed File section of our site. If you encounter this issue, please contact MSN for advice on how to proceed.

Viewing your Listings

To view all of your listings in products.live.com, you can use an URL such as the following:
http://products.live.com/products/results.aspx?q=*&site=www.yourstoredomainhere.com

If you need technical support from us, please contact us using the link in the footer.