Accounts must be prefunded and there is a minimum payment of $10.00. Other than that, there are no hidden fees, maintenance fees, minimum contracts, or cancellation fees. Setup fees are at your option.
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To run a submission manually, simply go to 'My Account > Manage > Submit a Task' and click the 'Submission' button. A task status page will appear.
You do not have to stay on the page or keep your browser open for the task to complete. Go to 'Manage > View Results' to view the submission history for the feed.
If you have multiple accounts with us that you would like to merge together, please contact us and provide us with the account email addresses of the account(s) you want to deactivate and account you want to keep. We will manually process your request. Feeds, alerts, and credit balances (excluding free trial credits) will be transferred, but not account credit history.
Product URLs in your store export may be listed as sub-domains of Yahoo. You can use the Display URL setting to convert those URLs to have your own domain name, for example, store.yahoo.com/acme can be converted www.acme.com. From the Define Fields page, click the 'Edit' link next to the Product URL field and follow the instructions. You can also use this setting to add tracking codes to your data feed.
Yes. You can set up exclusion criteria for your data feed that will automatically remove unwanted items from the submission. You can filter out products based on any field/attribute. For example, you can filter out all products with price under $1.00, or all products containing "gift certificate" in the title.
From the product list, you can review the filtered and unfiltered items before submitting. You can also filter out individual items with a single click.
There are many ways to exclude/include products from your data feed.
To exclude groups of items, go to "Manage Feed > Product Exclusion Criteria". Add criteria like 'price < $1.00', 'title contains "gift certificate"', or 'department starts with "Clearance"'. Then go to the "Product List" to review the filtered and unfiltered items.
You can add a custom field to your Yahoo Store, like 'exclude-from-nextag' with values 'y' and 'n'. Add a catalog field to your feed for this custom field, and mark it disabled. Now, simply create an exclusion criteria like 'exclude-from-nextag = "y"'. This method allows you to exclude/include products directly from your Yahoo Store catalog.
To exclude individual items, find the item using "Product Search" or by sorting the "Product List". From the "View Product" page, click the Exclude/Include icons. (Click the help icon there for more information.) This method can be time-consuming if you have many products.
You can also manually remove items. Download your data feed file from the "Data Feed File" page, remove the items using a spreadsheet program, and then upload it manually. This is not recommended because you would have to repeat the manual clean-up every time you want to submit.
After making your changes, run a Submission task from "Submit a Processing Request" to update your products.
If you have multiple Yahoo stores, you may have some items that exist in multiple stores with the same product ID. Google Base does not allow you to submit the same product more than once. The duplicate exclusion feature allows you to set a priority for each store. Products existing in multiple stores will only be submitted in the store with highest priority. This ensures that your feeds only submit each product once. To use this feature, simply assign a priority to each of your data feeds from the "Advanced Settings &rarr Duplicate Priority" page.
Legacy Yahoo stores do not support the catalog.xml Store Export file that would contain extended product attributes. As a workaround, you can embed these attributes in your product captions or descriptions as follows:
<!--
<googleproducttype>Sporting Goods > Indoor Games
> Bowling > Bowling Gloves</googleproducttype>
<pgcategory>Sporting Goods > Bowling > Gloves & Accessories</pgcategory>
<bingcategory>Sports & Outdoors > Bowling > Gloves</bingcategory>
<manufacturer>Acme Golf Supply</manufacturer>
<brand>Performance Golf</brand>
<upc>0123456789</upc>
<mpn>100XYZ</mpn>
<agerange>adults</agerange>
<feature>non-slip</feature>
<department>mens</department>
<height></height>
<width></width>
<depth></depth>
<color>white</color>
<material>leather</material>
<style>golf</style>
<madein>US</madein>
<shipping>US:::0.00</shipping>
-->
You can eliminate any tags that you do not need, and add tags that you want to include. For best results, we recommend adding a category field for each shopping engine. We can configure each feed to use the appropriate data. For the other fields like <manufacturer> and <mpn>, we can use the same data for every feed, so you do not need to make a different one for each shopping engine.
The information in the made-up HTML tags is commented out and will not be visible in your actual product pages, but you could use style sheets and display the information too. After you populate the data in your descriptions, just contact us and we can add the custom fields to extract the data. Your feed will have to be upgraded to an Advanced feed to support custom fields.
Not all the items need to have the embedded attribute values. We can define default values for those items with a value missing.
If product attributes are already in your descriptions in a consistent, standardized format, we can usually write custom fields to extract the existing attribute values.
Follow the instructions below to prevent a field from being written out to the data feed file.
You can still apply exclusion criteria to disabled fields. Also, the field will still display in the product list on our site, but the data will have a line through it.
Use Case 1
The Basic data feed templates contain fields that, in certain circumstances, you may not wish to submit to the search engine. For example, you may want to suppress the following, optional attributes of the Google feed:
c:options:string - all the option values of your productc:store_department:string - the product 'path' as defined in your Yahoo StoreThe above attributes are generated and submitted as custom attributes for the purposes of keyword optimization. You may prefer to disable them if you do not want those keywords as part of your data feed, or they contain prohibited words that are causing the listings to be rejected.
Use Case 2
Suppose you have a custom field in your store such as "cpc-submit". You set it to 'Yes' when you feel the product will provide a return on investment in a CPC-based shopping engine.
In this scenario, you can add an exclusion criteria to filter products by this field, but leave the field disabled so that it is not submitted in the data feed. Now, directly from your Yahoo Store, you have fine-grained control over the products being submitted.
Google Product Search prohibits items with words like 'free shipping' anywhere in the product listing. You may see a message like, "Prohibited word in attribute: title or description" when you view the status of your data feed in your Google Merchant account. Google's content policy states, "Text relating to shipping or store policies should not be included."
To look up the items with errors, use the Manage Feed > Search by Item Number page, and follow one of the workarounds below.
The best way to resolve this is to remove the policy text from your product descriptions, titles, and other fields. The disadvantage of this is that all your products will need to be edited.
If you decide to move the shipping policy text to another part of your product page, then you may have to modify your page template to display that text. You could also move the shipping policy text to an image, a custom field, or another store field.
Our system allows you to customize the product URLs in the data feed so that you can track referrals or conversions from the shopping engine, or use an analytics package such as Google Analytics.
In order to do this, you simply modify the Display Url property to include your domain name, a placeholder for the product ID, and then any tracking codes.
For example, you might specify:
your store domain placeholder tracking codes
URL: http://www.store.com/atensoft_product_id.html?utm_source=googlebase
See our support topic on the Display URL Setting for more information. Here are the steps to edit the Display URL setting:
Some larger Yahoo Stores track their inventory status in a MySQL database, which stores the product code and inventory count for each product. For these stores, we have the capability to read that data and include it in your data feed as the 'quantity' attribute. This allows you to appropriately mark out-of-stock items in your data feed to Google. Google may disapprove a data feed that includes out of stock items without quantity set to zero.
This feature requires an Advanced data feed, and you may need to install a simple PHP script on your Yahoo Hosting site. We may charge a small setup fee to install and configure this for you. Please contact us for more information.
Yahoo Store owners can get excited about the new Bing Shopping program by Microsoft. It is free to submit your product listings to them. Bing Shopping has gone through numerous incarnations, including Jellyfish, MSN Live ProductUpload, and Bing Cashback. It should become a major shopping venue as Microsoft aggressively promotes it.
Alternatively, you can add a custom field to your Yahoo Store catalog called "bingcategory", and fill in the appropriate top-level category there. Note, you should only enter the top-level category, and not any other sub-category information into this field.
| Arts & Crafts | Baby & Nursery | Beauty & Fragrance |
| Books & Magazines | Cameras & Optics | Car & Garage |
| Clothing & Shoes | Collectibles & Memorabilia | Computing |
| Electronics | Flowers | Gourmet Food & Chocolate |
| Health & Wellness | Home Furnishings | Jewelry & Watches |
| Kitchen & Housewares | Lawn & Garden | Miscellaneous |
| Movies | Music | Musical Instruments |
| Office Products | Pet Supplies | Software |
| Sports & Outdoors | Tools & Hardware | Toys |
| Travel | Vehicles | Video Games |
You can also view the file in your browser by opening the "File URL" in your web browser.
If the file doesn't exist, follow these instructions:
The data feed file can be hosted on our server so that a shopping engine can fetch it by HTTP. A few shopping engines require this method of submitting your listings. The URL of the file can be found on the "Manage Feed > Download Data Feed File" page.
In order to have the data feed file regenerated automatically, you must enable the 'Regenerate File' update method as described below.
You can enable or disable either or both of the update methods. The 'Update Frequency' setting applies to both update methods. There are no extra charges for these features.
We offer one-on-one consulting to optimize your data feed. While we can help you optimize your feed, we do not offer content optimization services at this time. However, we have collected the best advice we can find below, and can assist you in following that advice. By simply following these tips, you can dramatically increase your ranking in Google Product Search.
We strongly recommend to set your Google data feed to update Daily with Auto-skip Disabled. Submissions are free, so there is no additional cost to make this change. Google recommends daily submission as a best practice that will improve your ranking. This is recommended even if your listings do not change often.
To change the setting, simply log into your Aten Software account. Go to the "Manage Feed > Modify Settings" page. Set the "Update Frequency" to "Daily", the "Auto-Skip" setting to "Disabled", and then save the settings.
Completely entering your settings may help your store's visibility. Log into your Google Merchant Center account and go through each section of the Setting tab. Enter as much information as you can. Direct links to the important ones are below:
Google require a condition value of 'New', 'Used', or 'Refurbished' for each product. They also strongly recommend Brand and Product Type values.
You have two choices for populating these fields. One is to supply a default value that applies to all items, and the other is to supply a field name from your Yahoo Store Catalog. Go to the “Manage Feed > Define Fields” page. Click ‘Edit’ for the field, and then enter the default value and/or catalog field.
If you do not have a catalog field, then we suggest you provide default values as follows:
Use the instructions below to add a default product type value for your Google Product Search feed. Setting this field is recommended by Google, and can improve your ranking.
If you want product type to vary by item, follow these steps.
If you have more fields in your Yahoo Store catalog, you can output them to your data feed by adding Catalog Fields. You can also add Static Value fields, which will supply the same value for each product. The name of the field in the output file can be almost anything--see the Google Product Search Attribute List and Defining your Custom Attributes for details.
The values in the above field types are passed through directly without any changes. If you need special handling, consider upgrading to an ‘Advanced’ data feed. We have customizable field types that can do things such as remove HTML tags, remove boilerplate text, and re-categorize products.
You can easily add custom fields to your Yahoo Store catalog in order populate item-specific values by following the link below. Please contact Yahoo Store technical support for further assistance.
After adding the custom fields, use the Yahoo links below for instructions on how populate the data using Excel or Calc.
These instructions describe how to add attributes such as brand, MPN, UPC, and ISBN to your data feed. This assumes that you have the appropriate field added and populated in your Yahoo Store Catalog. If that has not been completed, please refer to How do I add custom fields to my Yahoo Store?. If you have a legacy store, please refer to How do I add custom attributes to a legacy Yahoo store?.
After completing the above steps, run a Retrieval task from the "Manage Feed > Submit a Task" page, then go to the "Manage Feed > View Random Product" to see a sample item listing. If the listing looks good, run a Submission task to update your listings.
You can use the Google Base Competitor Analysis Tool to find appropriate attributes to submit with your products. Enter keywords your customers use to find your products, and you can see the standard and custom attributes being submitted by your competitors.
Because Google’s search algorithms are secret, there is no guaranteed way to improve your visibility and ranking in the search results. Furthermore, as the algorithms change over time, your visibility and ranking will also change over time. The following are only general techniques to improve your search engine ranking for Google Product Search.
The closer your product descriptions and titles match the keywords that people are typing into the search box, the higher the resulting listing. Keyword order and spelling are important. Matches in titles rank higher than matches in descriptions. On your site’s product pages, text size, placement, and contrast affect the importance of the keywords. (Hidden text in meta tags is generally ignored.) These guidelines are not absolute.
Be sure to read through the Google Merchant Center Editorial Guidelines.
We also highly recommend the Yahoo Store Webinars.
Google Product Search is an unbiased product search engine, and therefore, usage of Google Checkout or Adwords does not affect your ranking. However, your store will be more prominently featured by having the Checkout badge next to your items. This is one avenue you may wish to investigate further. We currently do not offer any services in this regard.
We currently do not have specific instructions on enabling Google Checkout Badges for your items submitted to Google Merchant Center. However, you may find the following links helpful.
According to Google's Product Feed Specifications, the 'title' attribute has a suggested maximum length of 70 characters. Therefore, products with long titles will not be prohibited. However, since Google results only display about 70 characters of data, and products with long titles are not as user-friendly, it stands to reason that products with longer titles may be demoted in the ranking. Furthermore, the words after 70 characters may not be considered as relevant. Some SEO experts also recommend keeping page titles under 70 chars. Therefore, our opinion is that while an appropriate title length is important, it is not strictly necessary for every product.
Note that we have no direct knowledge of Google's algorithms, so the above suggestions represent an opinion only.
This service allows you to submit your products immediately. Google Base will process the submission within twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The steps are are listed below:
The following types of listings are filtered out automatically by our feed system, and will not appear in the product list.
Google, and most other shopping engines, require item listings to have a purchasable product on them with a minimum price of $0.01.
When you create your data feed, select 'Products' as the type, 'googlebase' as the format, and enter a file name ending in '.txt'. The default settings will work with our system, but if you need to verify them, follow these instructions:
Disabling quoted fields is the default and recommended setting.
Note that attributes that consist of multiple sub-attributes, such as 'tax', 'shipping', and 'compatible with', do not work if enclosed in quotations. Therefore, we recommend to set this to "No".
Google has been giving higher ranking to more optimized item listings. In order to maintain and enhance ranking, merchants need to be proactive with their data feeds, and follow the Google's Best Practices for Product Search.
We offer a one-time data feed optimization service for a flat fee. We would go through and add relevant attributes to your feed, and then offer you tailored suggestions for additional improvement. In some cases, it can make a big improvement in your ranking, although this is not guaranteed. See our Data Feed Optimization page for details, or submit an optimization request.
You also have the option of optimizing the feed on your own by following our Data Feed Optimization Tips for Google Product Search.
If you have a legacy store, you can add attribute data to your product captions. Our Advanced feeds have the capability to extract that information and submit the attributes to Google. See our instructions for legacy stores for more information.
Unfortunately, there is currently no way to control any aspect of your reviews in Google Product Search. Google does not provide any technical support for this, and they do not explain how reviews are gathered.
Changes are coming soon though. They are now accepting reviews from Bazaarvoice, and they hope to add additional partners, as well as a self-submission model. See the links below.
Google requires the following convention, according to Requirements for the "price" attribute.
If your items are sold in bulk, you must list the total price for the minimum purchasable quantity. For example, if a user must purchase a minimum quantity of ten items, you should include the total price for ten items (the minimum purchasable quantity).
Our system always submits the lowest sale price for your item. If the minimum purchasable quantity is always one, then submitting the sale price works fine. If it is greater than one, then we can program a workaround for this with an Advanced feed if the minimum quantity is available in your catalog.
For items in the Electronics category, you must supply at least two of the following three identifiers in your data feed: UPC, Brand, and MPN. Listings of Media items (music, movies, video games) require UPC, and Books require ISBN.
If you do not supply the above attributes, your listings in those categories may be demoted or excluded from the search results. Please refer to the articles below for help on adding these fields to your data feeds.
References:Our image hosting service solves the problem of missing images caused by out-of-date image URLs. As you may know, Yahoo Stores change the image URL every time your store is published. With daily feed updates, this is generally not a problem.
For those who publish very frequently or have other special feed requirements, image hosting provides a stable, unchanging image URL for each product. This URL redirects to the latest, up-to-date image on your Yahoo Store.
Copies of your images are not stored on our servers. For this reason, our image hosting service can not function as a backup service. However, by using redirects, our service leverages Yahoo's high-availability, load-balanced, unlimited bandwidth image servers. The refresh rate is also faster because the images are never copied to our servers. Best of all, since we do not have to maintain image hosting resources, we can offer this service for no extra charge.
The system maintains static image URLs for each product with the following format:
http://ih.atensoftware.com/FeedId/OfferId.jpgOur 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 every half an hour, ensuring that your new images will be accessible at the static URLs within half an hour after you republish your store.
Image hosting can be enabled from "Manage Feed > Advanced Settings", and is independent of update frequency. It may take up to half an hour for the hosted image URLs to become active. You can enable or disable image hosting on a per-feed basis.
Image hosting services are provided for no extra charge.
Go to the Manage > Define Fields page. The most important field to define is 'Categorization'. At a minimum, enter a default value. Look in the PriceGrabber General Feed Requirements for instructions on how to set the value. Their rate card contains the full list of possible categories.
If you want to specify item-specific categories, add a custom field to your Yahoo store. For further optimization, supply default values and/or catalog field names for the other fields of your data feed.
These are only the instructions to set up the data feed aspect of your account.
You need to enter your full, correct, Website URL in Google Merchant Center Settings tab, otherwise your feed may be disapproved.
If you see a "Website URL In Use by another account" error message, then the other account is usually the one that holds the automatic feed from Yahoo to Google. Google will remove your Website Url from that account after you follow the steps below:
Subject: Re:[#123456789] URL in use Thank you for your email. It appears the items from your website are currently being submitted by Yahoo!. If you are unable to view your items, please contact Yahoo! directly. Alternatively, if you'd like Yahoo! to stop submitting your items so that you can submit your items directly, please reply to this email.
Please disable the automatic feed from Yahoo so that I can submit my items directly.
Thank you for your email. I've resolved the issue that was preventing you from registering your domain name. Please know this change can take up to an hour to take effect.
More information: What does "This website URL is already in use by another Google Merchant Center account" mean?
You must use the online forms to contact Google Merchant Center, or reply to an existing support email. Be sure to search for answers online before contacting them, as their response time can be slow.
The steps below will show you the detailed, line-by-line error messages for your data feed.
To resolve item errors, use the 'Manage Feed > Search by Item Number' page to look up product details by item number. Once you find the problem, correct the product information in your Yahoo Store, and then resubmit your feed.
You may see one of the following errors from Google Base, which may cause some or all of your products to not be processed.
To resolve these errors, please check the settings in your Google Base account as described in this support question.
This message is just a warning and can be safely ignored. Items missing recommended attributes will process successfully. However, Google Base recommends including relevant attributes if they are available.
We have added this attribute to all the Google Feeds. You can configure a default value from the 'Manage Feed > Define Fields' page. You can also supply the name of a 'Catalog Field' from your Yahoo Store catalog, which is usually named 'ship-weight'.
You may encounter a problem where our system shows a successful submission, but you do not see any items uploaded in your Google Merchant Center account. It may say "None" under the "Last upload date & status" column in your Google Merchant Center account. If you see "Success" on our site, it only means that our system successfully uploaded the data feed file to them, not that they have processed the file.
To resolve this, check that the file name is exactly the same in both our site and in Google. The file name must end in .txt and it is case-sensitive. Also, remember that Google may take 24-72 hours to display the status of a recently uploaded file. If more than that time period elapses, you can contact Google.
You may occasionally receive an email from Google Base with subject, Google Base data feed file status on "file.txt": Data feed upload failure. You receive it even though you have not changed any feed settings and your feed has been working correctly. In your Google Base dashboard, you will see the following status message:
Outcome: Data feed upload failed. No items are live. help Number of items processed: 0 Number of inserted items: 0 Uploaded at: Oct 19, 2008 1:40 am PDT Processed at: Oct 19, 2008 10:11 am PDT
There would be no further details on the error message, and our system would show 'success' in the task history. This problem is usually due to a system error at Google Base. To resolve the issue, you simply have to resubmit your feed from your account.
For further information, you can view the following post in the 'Google Groups - Submitting Data Forum': Data Feed Upload Failure.
Google may send you an email saying "No Items Inserted" or "Internal error, feed was not fully processed" for your data feed. This error is usually spurious and can be ignored. You have several options:
You can also check the Google Merchant Center Forum to see if others are experiencing the same problem. If you continue to receive the same error email multiple times, contact us and we can check on your feed.
----- Sample Message ----
From: googlebase-noreply@google.com
To: info@store.yahoo.com
Sent: Thu, November 10, 2009 8:02:31 AM
Subject: Google Merchant Center data feed file
status on "googlebase.txt": 0 of 1999 items inserted
or Internal error, feed not fully processed
or No items inserted
0 of 1999 items inserted
or Internal error, feed not fully processed
or No items inserted
Uploaded at: November 10, 2009 2:28:42 AM PST
Processed at: November 10, 2009 3:52:36 AM PST
For more details on the status of your data feed,
go to http://www.google.com/merchants/showfeedsummary?fid=111111
This is a computer-generated email. Please do not reply.
You can change your notification settings at
http://www.google.com/merchants/basicsettings
Below is the procedure to recreate your data feed file in your Google Merchant Center account. You may need to do this if you are experiencing strange errors in your Google account, especially if your data feed file was registered a long time ago. This does not resolve all issues, and it is best to contact Google regarding the error in addition to attempting this procedure.
You can view your task results on the "Manage Feed > View Results" page for each data feed. If the task shows a successful submission, that means our server was able to upload the file via FTP to Google's FTP server. It does not mean Google has processed, or will ever process, the file.
If your Google Merchant Center Data Feeds page does not show that the feed is processing within an hour or so, check the following settings:
If Google disapproves your data feed, you will see "Disapproved" as the status in your Google Merchant Center on Data Feeds tab. When you expand the details, it will say, "Your data feed has been disapproved because some or all of your items are not complying with our Program Policies."
Unfortunately, we can not provide any support for disapproved feeds. This issue is between the merchant and Google, and there is nothing we can do about it. We do not have any knowledge of, and can not advise on a workaround. Creating a new Google account and resubmitting does not work, and is not recommended. The only assistance we can offer is to provide the self-help links below.
I have uploaded my first data feed file for your review. I would like to receive instructions on uploading the file via FTP upload. The server from which the file will be uploaded has an IP address of 76.75.210.45.
Make sure your products are properly categorized by following our instructions on setting the Category ID (in this topic).
To keep CPC costs low, you can use the Product Exclusion Criteria to filter out non-performing items, or items under a certain price. As an example, you can filter out a product if it does not yield any sales within 50 clicks.
Review the Shopping.com data feed specifications, and submit any additional attributes as recommended by them.
Recommended Attributes for Optimization, Source: Shopping.com
For Shopping.com categorization, we recommend that you add a field to your Yahoo Store called "shopping-category-id". Then, populate it with the appropriate category from the Shopping.com Taxonomy. You should select the single Category ID of the most specific category that applies to the product. For example, you would enter "419" for a telephone, which would place it in the "Electronics > Communications > Phones" sub-category.
Our shopping.com template is already configured to map this field from your Yahoo Store, otherwise, you can change the field name by going to "Manage > Define Fields". The automatic/manual categorization provided in your Shopping.com merchant account is usually not as reliable as this method.
Shopping.com displays prices based on the location that is entered by the user browsing the site (signed-in or not). In some states, the price may include sales tax, and shipping may be calculated based on the user's location.
After adding or removing fields in you Shopping.com data feed, you must remap the columns in your Shopping.com Merchant Account in order for them to recognize the changes. This is very simple to do. Just follow the step-by-step instructions below.
Reference: How do I map my column headers? in Shopping.com Merchant Support.
To set up product-specific category IDs, look for instructions on adding custom fields in our online help.
Our submission technology has been running continuously since early 2003, just after Froogle's inception in late 2002. Our secure, dedicated hosting is provided by Pair Networks. We process millions of listings daily.
We do support data feeds to Amazon. Please be aware that Amazon has three different programs through which you may submit your item listings:
We provide a Basic data feed for Amazon Product ads. This is easy to set up and works like all of our other data feeds.
For Amazon's other merchant programs (Selling on Amazon and WebStore), we can provide you a quote to create an Advanced data feed for your store. Please keep in mind the following caveats:
If you need information about or assistance with Amazon Product Ads, please contact:
Tino Romero Account Executive Channel Sales Business Development Amazon Services LLC - An Amazon.com Company Phone: 206-266-4434 E-mail: tromero@amazon.com
Once your credit balance goes below the notice threshold in your profile (default $5.00), our system emails you periodically to add credit to your account. Once you add credit, the notices will stop being sent.
If you would like to stop receiving reminders without adding credit, change your account status to "Inactive" from the change account status page. You can reactivate your account from the same page in the future.
Accounts are automatically deactivated after 180 days.
To change your low balance notice threshold, simply edit your profile.
Unfortunately, at this time, we do not support automated monthly billing. Instead, our system will email you Low Credit Notices once your balance becomes low. Just click the link in the email to add funds to your account. You can configure the low credit notice threshold from your profile.
Below is an overview of the steps required to set up data feeds to the various shopping engines.
If you get stuck on any step, feel free to contact us. If you would like optimization/set-up assistance, you can submit an Express Setup Request, and we take care of the feed setup. You would still be responsible for obtaining the merchant account, configuring your merchant account, managing bids, etc.
TheFind is a comparison shopping engine with about five million unique visitors per month, on par with Shopping.com and Shopzilla. The best part is that just like Google, there is no charge for their merchant program. This is a great way to promote your Yahoo Store products for free.
qfomsb4For more information on TheFind, you may find the links below helpful.
It is not possible to directly downgrade Advanced feeds due to the possible customizations they may have. However, you can simply add a new, Basic feed for that store and shopping engine. Configure this new feed based on the Advanced feed. Once you are done, you can delete the Advanced feed.
Please use the following instructions to download all your Yahoo Store images to your computer. These instructions are preliminary and subject to change.
First, configure your data feed.
Next, prepare a folder and download the images.
http://ih.atensoftware.com/12345/download-images.bat in your web browser. Replace '12345' with your FeedId, which can be found in your browser's address bar when you click on the Manage Feed page.Below are some notes about how this works.
We offer a WholesaleCentral.com data feed for your Yahoo Store. We recommend that you configure this feed to be uploaded daily to WholesaleCentral. Currently, WholesaleCentral requires you to log into their site and click a button for the feed to be processed. You will have to do this periodically, so we recommend that you bookmark the Submit Feed Page.
The IP address of our server is 76.75.210.45. This is the origin IP from which data feed files are be uploaded. A few shopping engines, such as ShareASale, require this IP address for restricting access to upload to their FTP server.
"If your items are sold in bulk, you must list the total price for the minimum purchasable quantity. For example, if a user must purchase a minimum quantity of ten items, you should include the total price for ten items (the minimum purchasable quantity)." Source: Google Merchant Center, Requirements for the "price" attribute.
Our system always submits the single item sale price for the lowest order quantity. The minimum purchase quantity is usually one, and for this scenario, submitting the sale price works fine. If it is greater than one, then we can usually program a workaround for this too.
Facebook ShopTab can accept a Google Base data feed file. However, you need to enable Image Hosting in order for it to work. Image hosting service is provided at no extra cost.
Enable image hosting from "Manage Feed > Advanced Settings". Wait about half an hour and resubmit your feed to ShopTab. Image hosting will rewrite the URLs so that they all end in JPG. The URLs will be on ih.atensoftware.com, and will redirect to the actual images on your site. That will be sufficient for ShopTab.
To set up your categories for UnboundCommerce mobile commerce data feeds, please use the examples below.
DESCRIPTION : SAMPLE CATEGORY Top-Level Category : Nike Shoes Category and Sub-category : Shoes > Nike Category and Sub-categories : Shoes > Nike > Slip-on Multiple Categories : Nike Shoes|Running Shoes Multiple Categories (example 2) : Shoes by Brand > Nike|Shoes by Type > Running
Tips
Legacy Stores
If you have a legacy store, you can embed the category information in an HTML comment inside the Caption field of each product. Add the code shown below to the bottom of every Caption, and change the category as appropriate.
<!-- <uc-category>Shoes by Brand > Nike|Shoes by Type > Running</uc-category> -->
Remember to replace the '>' greater-than character with '>' to ensure that the HTML code remains valid. For more information, see How do I add custom attributes to a legacy Yahoo store?
Sometimes, you may see the message, 'Store information no longer available', for one or more tasks in the "View Tasks" page. You will see this message when you have recently deleted a feed from your account. Deleting the feed deletes all the feed settings and results, but the task history will be preserved in your account. The tasks and messages will drop off the page after seven days.
Verification has two steps, verification and claiming. Verification proves that you have control over the URL, and claiming lets Google know in which Google account you want to use the URL. You can only claim the URL in one Google account, but you can verify it in many of them.
Verification must be done first via Google Webmaster Tools. Claiming is done on the Google Merchant Center Basic Settings Page. Both steps must be completed in order for your product listings to be accepted by Google.
We recommend that you verify and claim the root or parent domain of your website, without any prefixes. For instance, use "walmart.com" rather than "www.walmart.com". Verifying the former automatically verifies the latter, as well as any other sub-domains.
This topic covers how to claim and verify your Yahoo Store Website Url for use with Google Merchant Center. Google requires you to verify and claim your Website URL by May 18, 2010, otherwise, your listing will be disapproved. There are a lot of steps, but the process is very simple and should only take 5-10 minutes.
First, go to Google Webmaster Tools and log in with your Google Login.
After you log in, your screen will appear something like below. If your domain already appears as verified on this screen, then skip down to Step 7.
Click the "Add a Site" button, and enter your website domain name beginning with 'http' and, if applicable, without the 'www.' prefix.
You can specify either 'https' or 'http', but we advise 'http' to avoid SSL issues.
Leaving off the 'www.' prefix is advisable because then you will also be claiming all sub-domains of your domain.
After you add your site, you will be redirected to the 'Verify Ownership' page. On this page, select 'Upload an HTML file' as the 'Verification method'.
Copy the file name that you see to your clipboard, e.g. google99b9d12cd333da44.html
Reference: Verifying Site Ownership with Google
Go back to the 'Verify Ownership' page in Google Webmaster tools.
Click the link in step 3, where it says to 'Confirm successful upload by visiting ...'. A new window or tab should open, and it should look something like the screen shot below. If this doesn't happen, check again that you followed the prior instructions.
From the 'Verify Ownership' page in Google Webmaster tools, simply click the 'Verify' button.
If it is successful, you will be redirected to the Dashboard and your domain will be shown on the top left corner of the page, as shown below.
Go to Google Merchant Center and log in with your Google Login.
If you enter the Google Sitemaps Verification File in your Yahoo Store, but it appears blank when you view it in your browser, you can try the META tag method instead.
If you do not have that many items to delete, you can delete them from Catalog Manager directly. See How do I delete an item in Catalog Manager?.
Otherwise, download your catalog CSV file from Yahoo, then change the Path of the items you want to delete to a path like 'TODELETE'. Then, upload the file and commit. Now, you can just navigate to the 'TODELETE' section in the Store Editor, and delete it. All the items in that section will also be deleted. See Uploading and Downloading Items via Catalog Manager for more information.
See this page for more information on deleting sections and all the items in them: Deleting a Page in the Store Editor.
For additional support on this topic, please contact Yahoo Store Merchant Support directly.
We do not currently offer any Yahoo Store design services or RTML template development. However, we have had clients who have worked with the following companies. You could use this list as a starting point.
You can also consult the Yahoo Store Developer Network website, which has a listing of many design companies. (That website is scheduled to be revamped soon.)