uploading products into google base

As you already know Google is the most widely used search engine on the internet. If your a merchant and you run your your own private website, instead of selling on auction sites then you will want to maximize your traffic through Google.

Google base is a service from google that allows you to upload you product files, and have them directly searchable inside Google. This is great if your looking to increase you traffic easily and for free. Sometimes your eCommerce store is nowhere to be found on the internet, but if you upload your poducts to google base you'll instatnly impove your stores google ranking.

You will need to have your products ready in a spreadsheet to be able to tailor the google base template to your own products. The template is basic, and includes the title name, description, link to product, as the basic criteria, but you can add lots more attributes including prices, and pictures.

You will need to register for a google merchant account, before you can upload your feed, and once you have those setup, its actually very easy from there. You will need to follow the instructions from google to upload your file, but a problem i noticed lots of pople where running into was their file not being accepted by google and the error of

We couldn't understand the URL that you submitted. Please check the format of your URL.

This happens when you save your .txt feed file for uploading. You can use .xml feeds, but i found it easier just using the normal save as .csv file, and then renaming the file to .txt

Now, the feed error above happens when you save the file with the specific delimeters. You need to specify [TAB] as the first field, and in the text field, where normally the option shows either the double quotes " or the single quote ' You need to make sure that that part is blank. Delete anything out of that field.

This had me stumped for a while, and once I had that figured out, it worked perfect.

My Google feed items have been accepted, and i can see how many impressions i am getting, and how many click through there are on the items. Its like Google ad words for free!

The limits on the feeds are that they last for 30 days, so you will need to upload every 30 days, and also you can only upload a maximum of 10 feeds with 100,000 items, so you have a limit of 1 million items. This will be more than enough for most people.