Archived News

← Latest News

March 30, 2010 - WholesaleCentral.com Data Feed

We have added support for WholesaleCentral.com data feeds. There are WholesaleCentral data feed setup instructions in our support site.

We have also added instructions on how you can download all your Yahoo store images using our system.

March 25, 2010 - Website URL Verification Tutorial

Google recently sent an email to merchants with the subject, Action Required: Verify Google Merchant Center Website URL. This is a legitimate notice and represents a welcome change in the way Google verifies that you have control over your domain name. The process is now fully automated, and does not require contacting Google.

Nevertheless, there are quite a few steps, so to ease this process, we have put together a step-by-step tutorial with screen shots. Google is giving you two months to verify your URL. Otherwise, after May 18, 2010, Google will disapprove your listings. The procedure should take 5-10 minutes. Website URL Verification Tutorial for Yahoo Stores

We have received good response to our updated TheFind data feed. For those who are unfamiliar with it, TheFind is a shopping engine with about 5 million unique visitors per month, on par with Shopping.com and Shopzilla. (See Comparison Shopping Engine Traffic Statistics ) The best part is that just like Google, there is no charge for their merchant program. You would only have to pay for an additional Basic data feed on our system. After April 15th, that will be $4.50/month if you already have other data feeds. This is a great way to promote your Yahoo Store products. See our TheFind Setup Instructions

March 16, 2010 - TheFind Data Feed Updated

TheFind just released their new Merchant Center, where you can now submit your data feed file as you do for Google Base. Previously, TheFind was not accepting data feeds via their Merchant Center unless you had special arrangements with them.

We have updated the TheFind data feed template to their revamped specifications. Unless you were contacted separately, we have deleted all the old, TheFind, data feeds from our system, which were not being used. If you would like to submit your products to TheFind, please follow our step-by-step instructions to set up a new feed: TheFind Setup Instructions.

This was just released, so please expect delays with TheFind, and there may be more adjustments and changes ahead.

March 15, 2010 - New Pricing Announcement

In order to simplify our pricing structure, we are eliminating per-submission charges and changing to a flat-rate, monthly pricing for our data feed services. These pricing changes will enable us to continue to improve and enhance our system, as well as provide superior phone and email support. The new pricing will take effect on April 15, 2010.

March 3, 2010 - Data Feed File Name Error

Google is currently having an issue where some data feeds uploaded by FTP are receiving the data feed file name error. Google is aware of the problem and is working to resolve it. You can follow the status in the Google Merchant Center Forum: Known Issue: Data feeds uploaded via FTP receiving the data feed file name error.

In the meantime, you can ignore the emailed error messages, which look something like this:

Subject: Google Merchant Center problem with data feed file: "googlebase.txt"
On March 3, 2010 5:00:00 AM CST you uploaded to Google Merchant Center via FTP a file named "googlebase.txt", but you don not have a data feed registered with this name. Please verify that you provided the correct file name, including correct capitalization.

You do not need to take any further action. Our system will upload your feed according to the submission frequency you have selected. If you have infrequent submissions and you need to update your listings, you can run a manual submission via our website once Google resolves the issue.

February 25, 2010 - Become.com Feed Support

We now have a Become.com data feed template customized to their specifications. You no longer need to use the Shopping.com feed for Become.com. Please see our Become.com Support Page for step-by-step instructions on how to set up your data feed.

February 24, 2010 - Change to Advanced Feed Activity Rules

Retrieval tasks are no longer consider as 'activity' for the purposes of determining whether or not an Advanced data feed is active. Therefore, you can run retrieval tasks and review results for an Advanced data feed without incurring the Advanced feed service fees. Once a submission or data feed file task is executed, whether manual or automated, the feed will be considered 'active'. Fees are suspended after 30 days of no activity.

February 19, 2010 - Improved Account Navigation Interface

We have added dynamic menu bar to all account pages. The menu bar will help you quickly navigate your account, and understand the heirarchy of available functions. It will also remember the currently active data feed, and let you switch between feeds easily. Below the menu bar is a new bread-crumb style navigational aid. This will show the page title, helpful links, and/or the name of the currently active feed. We hope this new interface saves you time.

January 22, 2010 - Bi-weekly option available

We have added a bi-weekly submission frequency, which will submit your data feed twice a week on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Shareasale feeds can benefit from this option, because Shareasale can only receive feeds up to twice per week.

January 21, 2010 - Express Setup and Optimization

We now offer express setup and data feed optimization packages for a fixed price. Express setup includes feed setup and optimization. Optimization can be purchased by itself for customers with existing data feeds. Feel free to submit your request online via your account.

January 8, 2010 - Find products by item or line number

The Search Products page now allows you to find a product by item or line number. This can help you quickly troubleshoot feed errors that reference an item or line number.

December 18, 2009 - expiration_date attribute dropped

As we had mentioned a few weeks ago, we have dropped the expiration_date attribute from all Basic and Advanced data feeds. This field is no longer required by Google. All products will automatically be listed for the maximum number of days (30) by Google. If you were using this field in a feed for non-Google purposes, please be aware that the column order has shifted now that the expiration_date column has been removed.

We have also deleted all old "Live Search Product Upload" feeds. This has been replaced by Bing Cashback.

November 29, 2009 - expiration_date attribute in Google feeds

We will be dropping the expiration_date attribute from all Basic Google data feeds after December 15th. This field is no longer required by Google. All products will automatically be listed for the maximum number of days (30) by Google.

If you are using the Basic Google feed for non-Google purposes, please be aware that the column order will be shifted when the expiration_date column is removed. If you want the change to take effect immediately, you can disable the field from the Define Fields page at any time. We will not be changing any Advanced feeds, except on a case-by-case basis.

November 23, 2009 - Slow task processing issue resolved

Some accounts with large feeds have had internal system errors the past few weeks due to the routing issue. We have been manually resubmitting those. This has been due to the routing issue between our server and Yahoo Stores. That issue seems to be resolved today, so all feeds should be back to normal processing times without errors.

November 10, 2009

The recent slow task processing and internal system errors were caused by routing problems between our server and Yahoo Stores. We have implemented a temporary workaround as we monitor and try to resolve the issue.

On another topic, Google has begun to prohibit items with words like 'Free Shipping' anywhere in the product listing. We strongly recommend you to check your Google Merchant Center account to make sure that all your items are active. If you are affected, see How do I deal with items prohibited due to shipping terms? for possible workarounds.

Here are four, new features of our system:

Finally, Yahoo has recently released a series of Yahoo Store Webinars chock full of optimization strategies by leading experts. We highly recommend these.

October 21, 2009

We added a new Monitus Category Data Feed that contains your monitus-category and product id columns in a CSV format. You can use this to update your categories for the Web Analytics Connector for Google Analytics.

October 16, 2009

We added a new option to hide or suppress fields from your data feed. This is available to both Basic and Advanced feeds. This feature allows you to remove fields from your Basic data feed without needing to upgrade to an Advanced feed. You can still filter out products based on the data in a disabled field.

September 21, 2009

A handful of feeds had tasks with internal system errors due to a system bug over the past several days. This issue was resolved today and the feeds were resubmitted for no charge.

September 4, 2009

We have posted detailed instructions on setting up a Bing Cashback data feed for your Yahoo Store.

As you may know, Bing Cashback does not charge fees for listings or click-throughs. Instead, merchants only pay a commission when they make a sale. After a one-time, tracking pixel code installation, which can be purchased for $99.00 from YourStoreWizards.com, you can use our system to submit your data feed to Bing Cashback. This may be a low cost avenue for you to promote your products in an up-and-coming shopping search engine.

There are a few minor site improvements. You can now set your time zone in your profile. Also, the site will redirect you back to the last page you were working on if your session times out.

August 28, 2009

We discovered a bug where the expiration_date attribute for Google Feeds was not being updated if the Yahoo Store had not been published in a long time. This caused a handful of feeds to be submitted today with an expiration date in the past. We refunded the submission fee for those affected customers, fixed the bug, and manually resubmitted those feeds.

We have added a 'merchant sku' attribute to all Shopping.com data feeds to conform with their new feed requirements effective August 30, 2009. You may need to update the mapping in your Shopping.com merchant account. You may also need to supply a value for the manufacturer field. You may be able to use your store name as the manufacturer if you do not have product-specific information in your Yahoo back-end.

We have added a 'weight' attribute to all Google Base data feeds, because it is a recommended attribute. The values will be blank by default. If your Yahoo Store catalog has a field like 'ship-weight', then simply go to Define Fields and enter the field name as the Catalog Field Name for 'weight'. The 'weight' attribute has been inserted after the 'product_type' attribute, so if you are using this feed for non-Google purposes, you may want to review the column order for compatibility.

We instituted the following new pricing policy on August 21st. The Advanced data feed daily maintenance fee will be suspended if the feed has more than 30 days of inactivity (i.e. no processing tasks). This will allow you to preserve your advanced feed settings during times when you are not using the data feed.

In addition to continual refinements, we have a several new features on our site. We have redone the support section of our site with a find-as-you-type question search. There are multiple ways to view the support topics, and we have added and updated many topics. We have also revamped the 'Add Feed' page to make the user-interface much easier to use.

July 15, 2009

Press Release - Launch Advanced Data Feed Service

June 26, 2009 - New Data Feeds Supported

We now support the following data feeds for your Yahoo Store:

For a complete list, with links to merchant sign-up pages, please see our Supported Engines page

June 10, 2009 - Data Quality Improvement

The new engine includes a data quality improvement for the Google Base data feed. First, instead of appending product options to the end of the product description, product options are submitted in a new, custom field called c:options:string. Also, the text of the product options is filtered to remove reserved words and pricing information, which reduces irrelevant keywords.

June 5, 2009 - ‘Condition’ attribute and other news

The Google Base ‘condition’ attribute will be required beginning June 30, 2009.

One of the three values, ‘new’, ‘used’, or ‘refurbished’ must be supplied for each product. Your Google Base data feed already contains the ‘condition’ attribute, and you can configure either a default value or catalog field. In order to accommodate this change, we have changed the default value to ‘New’ where it was currently undefined for all Google Feeds.

If you only sell new products, then no action is required on your part. If you sell any used/refurbished products, we recommend that you supply a catalog field name so that item-specific condition values can be supplied. Go to “Manage Feed > Define Fields” to set the catalog field name.

Please check out our newly updated Optimization Tips For Google Base page for instructions on how to add a ‘condition’ field to your Yahoo store.

As a reminder, our pricing was updated on June 1, 2009. Also, since Microsoft’s Live Search Product Upload Beta has been discontinued, we have disabled image hosting on those data feeds. We will be deleting those data feeds soon.

Finally, we now support the following templates for your Yahoo Store:

If you have any requests, please let us know.

May 29, 2009 - Character Encoding Issues

We have improved the way character-encoding issues are handled in the system. Special characters, and especially Windows CP-1252 characters, are correctly processed and output in the LATIN1/ISO-8859-1 character set. Previously, they were being converted to spaces. This should result in more accurate data feed output, and potentially, better search engine ranking.

May 16, 2009 - Discontinuation of Microsoft/MSN Live Product Upload

Microsoft recently sent email notifications that their Live Search product upload beta has been discontinued. As such, all data feeds to MSN Live Search Product Upload have been set to disabled. We recommend that you delete those feeds from the Manage Feed page.

If you are interested in Microsoft’s replacement program, please review the following link: Live Search Cashback. If you need assistance in setting up a data feed, please send us the specifications and we can help you set up the data feed.

May 16, 2009 - System Errors

An internal system error (caused by failed domain name lookups) caused some submission and alert tasks to fail on May 15th. These tasks were manually resubmitted today if they had not already been automatically resubmitted.

May 14, 2009 - New Pricing Reminder

This is just a reminder that our fee schedule will be changed on June 1, 2009. See our Service Pricing page for details.

All data feeds have been migrated to the new data feed engine now. The change occurred transparently and did not require any interaction on your part. We will be adding more documentation and features in the coming months, so stay tuned.

April 18, 2009 - Advanced Data Feed Engine and New Pricing

We are pleased to announce the availability of our new data feed engine. This new engine is fully customizable. It will allow you to submit your products to more comparison shopping engines (CSEs), and submit them in a more optimized way. Additional CSEs will be announced as they become available.

The new engine allows you to select the desired CSE template and a feed type, ‘Basic’ or ‘Advanced’. Basic feeds have all the features and configuration options of the current system. We will be converting all Google and Shopping.com data feeds to ‘Basic’ feeds over the next few weeks. ‘Advanced’ data feeds are fully configurable and can support custom-programming, for an additional fee described below. (We have already notified customers who need Advanced feeds.)

The new feed engine comes with the following website enhancements:

We have not changed our pricing for two and a half years. To keep up development and provide superior support, we will be implementing the following changes, effective June 1, 2009:

  1. Advanced data feeds will incur an additional charge of $0.25/day per Advanced data feed (or about $7.50/month/feed). There is no such charge for the Basic data feeds.
  2. The price to submit a data feed (or generate a data feed file) will be reduced from $0.30 to $0.25.
  3. The daily account service fee will be increased from $0.15 to $0.20 (from about $4.50/month to about $6.00/month per account).
  4. The image hosting service will continue to be provided at no charge until further notice.

See our Service Pricing page for details.

March 24, 2009 - Google Base FTP Issue Resolved

Google’s FTP server returned to normal operation sometime yesterday. All scheduled feeds were processed correctly this morning.

Those of you with feeds that do not run daily may want to manually submit your feeds due to the missed submissions over the weekend. You can review your feed’s submission history under Manage Feed -> View Results.

March 23, 2009 - Google Base FTP Server Issue

Google’s FTP server has not been responsive since approximately March 21st. Submissions since then have failed with the error, "Connection reset by peer." Our system does not charge you for failed submissions. Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do to upload your data feed(s) until they restore service. You can follow the Google Base discussion forum here for updates.

We will post another announcement once they have restored service. People with feeds that do not run daily may want to manually submit their feeds once service is restored. Otherwise, you do not need to take any further action.

February 20, 2009

Due to an XML-processing bug in an external library, a small number of feeds were submitted with missing image links or incorrectly parsed descriptions from Feb. 17 through the morning of Feb 19th. We found and corrected the bug on Feb. 19th. All of the affected feeds have been resubmitted yesterday and today for no charge. We have further refunded all submission and bulk upload fees during the period, even if your feed was not affected. Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.

January 16, 2009

Shopping.com data feeds are now tightly integrated into the system. Other screens have also received a face lift. You may notice some superficial differences, but otherwise, the changes should be seamless.

December 17, 2008

Many Google submission tasks failed with the error, "connect() timed out", when connecting to Yahoo stores. These tasks were resubmitted later in the morning, and fees for these tasks were refunded.

December 14, 2008

After performing some upgrades to the system on Thursday/Friday, a system error occurred where your Google feed may have been submitted even if it should not have been. Due to this error, we refunded all charges for automated Google submissions submitted on Saturday morning (Dec. 13th, 2008). The error has been fixed and the system is back to normal now. Sorry for any inconvenience that this may have caused.

December 2, 2008

Google Base recently added the ability to define tax and shipping settings for your data feeds. Their announcement is here.

It is strongly recommended that you configure account-level default values in your Google Base account. This is the easiest way to set up your tax and shipping settings. Just follow this link: Tax and Shipping Settings

Just a reminder, to get the best placement in Google Base, it is recommended to refresh your data feeds more frequently. According to Google Base: "Refresh your bulk uploads to keep your data up to date. Our algorithm will demote items that are not refreshed regularly." (Source)

To get the maximum exposure, you can set your feed’s submission frequency to ‘Daily’ and set the ‘Ignore Published Date’ setting to ‘Yes’ in your feed settings. While there will be extra submission fees, those may be offset if you obtain higher rankings. (Note, we can not guarantee ranking.)

November 7, 2008

Our system now posts your payment instantly when you purchase credit using Google Checkout.

October 7, 2008

Google feeds now support up to ten custom fields (up from five).

August 7, 2008

On Sunday morning, August 3rd, data feeds to Google Base/MSN Live had an error where all the fields were being single-quoted. This error was fixed, and all feeds were resubmitted later that day for no charge. You may see an email with subject "Data feed upload failure" or "Catalog Rejected" for that upload, but you can ignore this. Check your Google Base account for the latest status of your feed if you want to confirm. Sorry for the inconvenience.

The error was caused by some code changes we made to improve performance of the data processing. On the plus side, data processing is now about two times faster.

March 17, 2008

The server stability issue has been identified and resolved. The system is back to normal.

March 13, 2008

Our server is experiencing some stability issues, which we are working to resolve. Some tasks may fail with an internal system error, or take longer than expected to complete.

March 8, 2008

We launched a beta of an image hosting service and a data feed to MSN Live Product Upload.

February 21, 2008

We added SSL encryption to the login and account pages. We renamed "bulk upload" files to "data feed" files, to follow Google Base convention.

July 30, 2007

The "label" field has been deprecated by Google Base, so we have renamed it to a custom field called "store_department". This field contains your Yahoo store path or category information.

June 26, 2007

The website was down for about half an hour around 3pm due to a server issue at our hosting provider.

June 6, 2007

Yahoo recently placed the Sale Price in a separate field in their store export (objinfo.xml) file. This caused our system to pick up the full price instead. We changed the system Friday morning to read from the new field. Thus, your next, scheduled submissions to Google Product Search will have the correct pricing. You can also submit manually if you want the prices updated immediately. We have issued a refund of submission fees for Thursday and Friday morning, which will appear as a credit in your accounts.

April 8, 2007

We have made a small change to the way Froogle feeds are submitted. In order to ensure continuity of your listings, submissions attempts will be made on a daily basis whenever an actively scheduled feed is determined to be expired. An active feed is considered expired if approximately 30 days have passed since the last successful submission. This change will help prevent your listings from going inactive in Google Base/Froogle in certain situations.

We made a small change in the user interface. When you click buttons to submit processing requests, such as retrievals or submissions, the task will always be executed regardless of the last published date of your store. Thus, you no longer have to manually reset the last published version dates when resubmitting a feed via the website.

We also detected and fixed a few errors in the system, and some of you may notice refunds in your account history. In February, we detected an error in the Froogle submissions where the last submitted publishment date was being ignored. This caused feeds to be uploaded even if they were already up-to-date. Therefore, we refunded all Froogle feed submission charges between 2007-02-19 6AM and 2007-02-25 3PM EST for all accounts.

We had changed the system for a short time to enclose fields in double-quotes. However, this was later disabled, as most bulk upload files were configured with this option off. The extra double-quotes had only a cosmetic effect, and did not effect searchability of the products.

February 18, 2007

Our system now supports the new attributes required by Google Base, including brand, condition, product type, and expiration date. Yahoo store merchants have a number of options for populating this data.

February 15, 2007

The issues that affected Google's FTP server have been resolved.

February 11, 2007

Google's FTP server has been refusing connections sporadically over the past several weeks. We offset this by implementing automatic connection retries. However, their FTP server has become progressively worse, and this weekend (Feb. 10-11, 2007), it did not accept any connections.

Google will likely correct the problem with the server soon. Customer's with infrequent submissions may want to review the status of their feeds in Google Base. Once the FTP server is responding again, you may want to resubmit manually.

To guard against your Froogle product listings becoming inactive without you knowing, consider setting up a Google Base Alert in our system. An alert will notify you by email when your product count in Froogle goes to zero (or any other threshold). You can configure it to check the listings from daily to monthly, and the cost for each check is only $0.05. There is a "Wizard" button to help you set up alerts for each store.

January 31, 2007

Some customers may have received an email from Google Base indicating that they will require additional product attributes in the bulk upload file beginning March 2007. Please rest assured that we will implement these new attributes well before then, as we did when Froogle converted to Google Base in June 2006.

The five new required attributes are 'id', 'brand', 'condition', 'expiration_date', and 'product_type'. 'id' is currently being submitted. 'expiration_date' will always be set to the latest allowed date. The remaining three fields, 'brand', 'condition', and 'product_type', are not available by default in your Yahoo Store product table. For those fields, we will provide options in your feed settings to populate the fields. These may include sending blank values, default values, or values pulled from your store’s custom fields (as is done for Shopping.com feeds). We expect that for many merchants, sending blank or default values will be sufficient. We will provide further instructions soon.

Shopping.com data feed services will return to normal pricing tomorrow, February 1, 2007.

January 1, 2007

As indicated earlier, the account service fee of $0.15 per day (about $4.50 per month) takes effect on January 1, 2007. All other pricing remains the same. To reflect this and other changes, the terms of service have been updated. Thank you for the opportunity to provide you with data feed services for your Yahoo store.

Remember, the Shopping.com data feed service is free through January 31, 2007. Using this service may increase your ROI.

December 1, 2006

We are pleased to announce a new Shopping.com data feed service for Yahoo Stores. Shopping.com is the largest comparison shopping site on the Internet. Shopping.com charges merchants by cost-per-click. Submitting data to them by Product Feed File Upload is free. Our new Shopping.com service does exactly this, with a similar feature set to the Froogle data feed service.

This service will have the same pricing structure as the Froogle data feed, which is $0.30 per submission of unlimited products in one store. As an incentive to try this new service, all Shopping.com services will be free of charge through January 31, 2007. To get started, simply log into your account and click the "Add Shopping.com feed" link.

We have not raised our fees since Feb. 1, 2005. In order to maintain our low, a-la-carte pricing, provide ongoing maintenance and support, and develop new services, we will be instituting an account service fee of $0.15 per day per account. The total fee will be approximately $4.50 per month per account. This fee will apply to both active and inactive accounts. You may still request a refund of your available credit at any time should you wish to cancel service. The minimum payment amount will be increased to $10.00. This new policy will take effect on Jan 1, 2007.

November 27, 2006

Our system now includes product options in the Froogle feed. When options exist, they are appended to the product description in a readable format, e.g. "Smily Face T-Shirt - Options: Size: S, M, L - Color: White, Black". More keywords in the description help your search result rankings for longer, multi-term queries. Longer queries tend to have higher conversion rates.

We also detected a glitch in the Froogle feed that was dropping the capital 'F' character from the data during the last few weeks. All feeds submitted or retrieved in the last month have been resubmitted, and a credit has been issued to your account for the submission. All bulk upload files for download have also been regenerated free of charge. Please accept our apologies for this error.

November 18, 2006

Announced the new Product Count Alert service.

November 4, 2006

You can now download your bulk upload file from your account.

October 4, 2006

Somacon has been reorganized as Aten Software LLC and the website moved to this site. There are no there changes to our service at this time. We hope to provide you with additional services in the near future.

June 2, 2006

The system has been updated and now sends feeds (bulk uploads) to Google Base. Your products should appear in both Froogle and Google Base search results. Some users may have to recreate their FTP credentials by logging into their Google Base account.