How do I add custom fields to a legacy Yahoo store?
Please see here for a new, easier alternative to the method described below:
Legacy Yahoo Store RTML Template to Export Custom Attributes as CSV or Excel
Legacy Yahoo stores do not support the catalog.xml Store Export file that would contain extended product attributes. We can map 'manufacturer-part-number' (MPN) to your Yahoo Product ID or Code field if that works. For 'brand', we can set the default value equal to your store name if it applies to all your products. Otherwise, you can embed product-specific values for these attributes in your product captions or descriptions as follows:
<!--
<brand>Performance Golf</brand>
<upc>012345678912</upc>
<mpn>100XYZ</mpn>
<gpcategory>Sporting Goods > Indoor Games
> Bowling > Bowling Gloves</gpcategory>
-->
The fields shown above are the recommended minimum, but you can add or remove fields as needed. For example, if your MPNs are in your Code field, brand is your store name, and product type is the same for all products, then you can add the UPC as follows:
<!-- <upc>012345678912</upc> -->
For any products with no tags, or with missing values in the tags, our system will just leave the value blank in the feed. Therefore, you can add data over time and it will be automatically picked up in the feed as it is made available.
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, you must contact us and we can set up your feed to extract the data.
Your feed will have to be upgraded to a Custom feed to support this technique.
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.
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.
Click the following link for more information on configuring brand, MPN, and UPC.
Below is a more extensive example of the attributes you can provide using this technique. The tags are listed in order by our estimation of importance to Google.
<!--
<brand>Performance Golf</brand>
<upc>0123456789</upc>
<mpn>100XYZ</mpn>
<gpcategory>Sporting Goods > Indoor Games
> Bowling > Bowling Gloves</gpcategory>
<googleshipping>US:::0.00</googleshipping>
<googletax>US:CA:8.25:y</googletax>
<agegroup>adult</agegroup>
<gender>unisex</gender>
<color>white</color>
<size>Small</size>
<material>leather</material>
<pattern>solid</pattern>
-->