14 replies to this topic

[jestep]

Starting several months ago, I found that after using Googlefeeder (as I had for more than a year at least once a month) that suddenly after one day or less Google would delete all my products. (That is 10,000 products in one database & 50,000 plus in another). Google had announced the changes and finally changed their requirements.

For me, it looked like Google expected me to add at least the following fields for each product:
GTIN, GOOGLE_PRODUCT_CATEGORY, MADE_IN, MPN, PRODUCT_TYPE, BRAND, and CONDITION. For other sites selling books and media, they would need ISBN.

Since I was on a heavily modified osCommerce v2.2 this was a BIG decision. Finally, I decided to make the big leap & install v2.3.1 but I kept my old database and made the two patches cited in the guidelines.  I have no clue if any of these fields are in the v2.3.1 (new install) but I suspect that they are not in the new Table Products since nothing is blowing up and asking for them.

My normal routine is to upload all products with Easy Populate. This is an exceptionally fine piece of code which seems to be keeping up with osCommerce V2.3.1 and Google's new Requirements. Unfortunately the new v2.3.1 apparently needs more product related fields in order to keep up with Google. (That is if we want to sell anything!)

So this topic is dedicated to those brave souls who will help produce a package of mods to update the osCommerce database allowing us to then use Easy Populate to update these new database fields, which in turn will keep us from getting all our products rejected by Google even though we are on the cutting-edge latest milestone v2.3.1 from osCommerce.

[Jack_mcs]

All you need to do is install the google feeder contribution.

[geoffreywalton]

There are already add-ons for adding new fields to the product.

EP can be amended to update these new fields, the documentation on how to do this is already there.

And as Jack says Google feeder will produce the reqired output.

Cheers

G

[jestep]

Thanks to Jack & Geoffrey.

I have read and installed the latest version of Googlefeeder.php. That's how I realized what was needed to fix Google's concern

I guess I just need to get the specs on each of the fields and add them to the Table Products & then setup Googlefeeder to grab the data from these new fields and to set up or modify Easy Populate to load the data for the new fields.

I agree that it can be done either with good personal expertise or a smart osCommerce contractor, but since it is somewhat a universal problem and as an old guy who no longer has the personal expertise to do such great coding I thought this was an excellent idea and the best venue to get a collaorative result that would help a lot of USA users.

[Jack_mcs]

Very few sites need to add database fields to satisfy googles requirements. But if yours does, Easy Populate won't do it for you. There are contributions you can install that will do that but it would be overkill to install that for just the one or two fields you may need, in my opinion.

[geoffreywalton]

Without looking product extra field and new field everywhere might be 2 to look at .

I think Jack misread your post as you do not seem to be expecting EP to "do it for you" but to allow you to import the new data. Instruction on how to set up EP to update new fields are in the documentation and EP php file itself.

Jack would be a better source on how to update GF to extract data from tese fields if they are in a new file.

Good Luck

G

[jestep]

I have installed Jack's (et al) Add_More_Fields and it works great. Using it, I added these fields to the Product Table: brand (Brand), mpn (Mfgr Part Number), producttype (Product Type), googleproductcategory (Google Product Category), and condition (Condition). There are a couple of other fields that might be needed for Google if you sell books (media) or are located in Europe or Asia. a BIG THANKS to Jack for a great contribution.

Wit that the contribution installed and 5 field added to 2 different web sites, I was ready to use Easy Populate to add my products again with the new fields. EP is well documented so it is easy to change the array and add the new data fields.

HOWEVER, after adding more than 2000 products, I found an unusual (somewhat random) problem. It was on the Admin side when looking at the new products. Some records had the Tax Class as none and others had the Tax Class correctly entered as Taxable Goods. Since every record had been freshly entered via spreadsheet, I assumed that I had mad a mistake and failed to enter a full column, but after checking every spreadsheet (15-20 of them) not one was missing a single Tax Class entry. Every one had a header of "v_tax_class_id" and data below that was "Taxable Goods".

This will cause a heavy staff work load to have to go and check every entry from now on looking for an incorrect Tax Class, so please share with us if you find and solve this perplexing problem.

[Jack_mcs]

jestep, on 12 February 2012 - 05:26 PM, said:

Wit that the contribution installed and 5 field added to 2 different web sites, I was ready to use Easy Populate to add my products again with the new fields. EP is well documented so it is easy to change the array and add the new data fields.

Add More Fields will add the new fields to the easy populate file for you, if you use that option, so there's no reason to manually edit it.

Quote

This will cause a heavy staff work load to have to go and check every entry from now on looking for an incorrect Tax Class, so please share with us if you find and solve this perplexing problem.

Contribution specific questions should be asked in the support thread of that contribution since you are likely to get quicker and better results that way. But if a product isn't being loaded correctly via easy populate, create a new spreadsheet file with just that one product, and maybe the one before it, and run that script. If it doesn't update, then there is something wrong with one of those entries and you would need to narrow it down from there.

[jestep]

Maybe I am missing something, but I don't think so.
It seems to me that it was suggested that I use the Add_More_Fields contribution. Well, I did and it worked great. So then I went and used Easy Populate to add my products again to my database with the array containg the 5 new fields. Well, I also did that and it seemed to be working fine except "randomly" some would have the Tax Class correct and some would say "none". (I even followed the suggestion above but could not determine what caused this problem,) Well I figured out that I could go back distributor by distributor and use Easy Populate to download all my products to a csv spreadsheet and after fixing the Tax Class column, I could upload them again and all was OK. Well, I was quite happy at this point.

But this whole exercise was so that I could use the latest googlefeeder (or the Froogle feeder in Easy Populate) to upload to Google. My expectation was that I would have the new fields that Google wanted and that they would no longer reject my uploads.

Well, that was when I found out that neither the latest googlefeeder nor the Froogle option in Easy Populate used the new fields over in the Add_More_Fields table. Instead they would only take the new fields created by the "Extra Product Fields for oscommerce v2.3x core" contribution (with 2 subsequent bugfix contributions).

So now I have installed the Extra Product Fields ("EPF") sql database changes and I have also completed the public-side EPF changes. All has gone well except I have an error with the advanced search:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '<' in /home/northtex/public_html/catalog/advanced_search.php on line 20

(The new "regular" [not advanced] search works great and now allows a visitor to optionally refine a search adding a category and/or a manufacturer. Pretty neat!)

I went back and re-loaded the osc V2.3.1 catalog/advanced_search.php and made the changes a second time, but I still get the same results. (Sorry folks, I follow good instructions quite well, but I am not a PHP coder.)

[Jack_mcs]

The answers are here but you don't seem to want to accept them. Install Add More Fields, or some other contribution if you prefer,  add the fiels to Easy Populate (Add More Fields does that for you), enable the option to use the fields in the google feeder file (the names of the database fields have to match) and you're all done.

Edited by Jack_mcs, 17 February 2012 - 07:19 PM.

[jestep]

In response to "booksfromhome":
I consider the "real v2.3.1" to be: 1) www.oscommerce.com 2) Solutions 3) Downloads 4) Download oscommerce-2.3.1.zip
Yes, since I have installed v2.3.1, I used the "use_if_version_greaterthan_2.3". I followed install.txt. The only install problems were in admin/categories.php which starts on page 2. The first of three mis-matchs begins on page 5.  My solution was simply to use the admin/categories.php provided by Jack in "use_if_version_greaterthan_2.3" since I had no other mods at that time.

Jack suggested to not use the Froogle option in Easy Populate and instead to use googlefeeder.php. First I was quite surprised when I went to my osc database and found my 5 new fields actually in the Product Table since I had misunderstood and thought that they were just data elements in the Add_More_Fields Table. I new then that the error was mine. As Jack clarified for me, the names of the database fields are in the comments to the right. I made some database changes in both the Product Table and Add_More_Fields Table (The names must agree. The table_name column, for me, was all "products". The field_name column did not have the "products_" prefix but otherwise matched perfectly.). As an example, I had to make the following changes to my 5 new fields in the Product Table in order to make googlefeeder work:
1) brand was changed to products_brand
2) mpn was changed to products_mpn
3) producttype was changed to products_product_type
4) googleproductcategory was changed to products_google_product_category (NOTE - you will also need to make a googlefeeder fix about line 301 where you will change from "google product_category" to "google_product_category")
5) condition was changed to products_condition

I hope this example will help others avoid my mistakes. Be sure to have the correct database names and Display names in the Easy Populate array or arrays and to just use googlefeeder.php to upload to Google.

[jestep]

Issue solved on my "Tax Class" problem! It seems that the problem was in Easy Populate. Years ago it was OK to have a Tax Class header "v_tax_class_id" which exactly matched the name in the product table. I can't say if it was ever tax_class_id in the osc database but it is now products_tax_class_id currently.

However, after re-reading the documentation and verifying it in the Easy Populate code, the correct hader is now "v_tax_class_title" and the correct data would either be "none" or Taxable Goods".

Mea culpa!
Joe

[jestep]

I recently noticed that Google was again deleting all my Googlefeeder uploads on two seperate web sites. The implication was that it was an expiration date problem. On 6/22/2012 I created a new data file so the expiration date should have been 30 days in the future from that date and time. Instead I was apparently getting a date of 6/19/2012 on all records.

I went ahead and updated to "GoogleFeeder V 3.0 updated by Jack_MCS" but I still get the same results.

I was just wondering if anyone else is having a similar problem?????

[jewelplus]

Would appreciate clear directions on how to add the google product category in my Easy Populate spreadsheet, and also what else is needed to enable the google product category in the googlefeeder file....thank you

[jestep]

I think the simple solution in dealing with Google is to be able to download on-the-fly one additional field: "products_id". I tried both selecting all the fields one by one and selecting a "complete" download and I do not get the "id" field in either case. Google wants to disallow the Model field and also wants the "unique" product identifier to be numeric. Granted that we should not be able to upload "id", but it would be nice to download it since the we could add it to the data we display in the product description.

Basically we have four potential ways to search for a unique product:
1) We can use the "id" field which we can get from Google feeder and send to Google.com/base.
2) We could live in an ideal world and all our vendors and distributors would give us a UPS or bar code number.
3) We could build a unique Model (as most of us do now) but unfortunately Google doesn't seem to want us to use it.
4) Or we could use "Brand" and "MPN" according to Google. Unfortunately, their computer only looks at MPN, not both fields and consequently with multiple manufacturers it is quite possible to have lots of products rejected because they are not unique.

So my BIG REQUEST is that in the next update of Easy Populate we can always get both model and id downloaded on-the-fly and never allow it to be uploaded since it is computer generated upon the creation of a new product.