Google Feed questions - ID and Shipping

[LNJSports]

New to the 3DCart platform which we just came from the prostores platform which that took care of our google feeds. We have a few questions regarding setting up the custom fields we want for 3DCart.

1) Is it best to use 3DCart "id" field as google "id" field? The reason why I ask is that we have SKU numbers for "id" and our prostores feed used the unique number that is 3DCarts "catologid" for the google id field.

2) Shipping field question: We have about 75% of our products that we offer free shipping, but the others are UPS Ground calculated rates. What is the trick in setting up a custom export set up to populate our feed?

Example of our previous feed:
Items that we offer Free Shipping, the data field contained this: US::Standard Shipping:0 (this was flat rate shipping of $0.00 that we had for all our free shipping products).
Items that were calculated rate, the data field contained this: US::UPS Ground

I was just wondering if there are other 3DCart users that may work off the same shipping method and was wondering how they set up their custom google fields.

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards
Joey

[tclifesafety]

1. You can use either - catalogid is probably best since it will never change.
2. I use GoDataFeed to manage my feeds, so I can't comment on the syntax, but for us, if we have Free Shipping on a product, a zero is used. Otherwise, the field is blank, which defaults to carrier-calculated shipping.

[LNJSports]

Thank you for that info. I went ahead and used the CatalogID.

I was curious to know if you can just use a zero for the shipping syntax is acceptable in a feed with google?? I thought that it had to be in a certain format such as-> US::UPS Ground:0 USD

Also, when using the custom feed feature, what is the trick to have either Suffix or Prefix to hold the "space" when it does the export? To basically have a space before the character you assign.

Regards
Joey

[TMS Clint]

I don't know how you would handle dynamically generated shipping costs, but we offer free shipping on most items and fixed price shipping on others. We set our store's default to free shipping in Google (done in your Google Merchant account). Then, for items with shipping costs we use one of the extra fields and use a static number for shipping (for example: US::Ground:7).

Although, now that I'm writing it out, I don't know why I don't just use [shipcost] and prefix it with "US::Ground:" ...

[Scott McKirahan]

Interesting. I've been using the paid Google Shopping (formerly PLAs) since the first month they came out (when they were MUCH cheaper) and have never worried at all about getting the shipping exactly right. Since the majority of our products ship free, I set it to free in the default section and have never bothered adding a shipping cost to those products that don't have free shipping. I've never had a feed rejected because of it.

[TMS Clint]

... I've never had a feed rejected because of it.

You feed won't be rejected, but your products might be individually and it won't appear in your feed report. Be sure to check the "Diagnositcs" section of Google Merchant Center to see if you have any item errors or warnings.

[LNJSports]

Scott,

One thing I know about google and the shipping policy is that if your products are not accurately set up in your feed to what is displaying on your site is this. Yes, they will show on searches and PLA but if google finds out, they will put it on suspension hold or warning. We had that happen with our previous cart we had which they provided free daily feeds. I also know that google is being more strict with things of late as well.

This is why we try to provide the most accurate information in our feed.

Joey

[Scott McKirahan]

Joey and TMS Clint, maybe I've just been lucky but, like I said, I was one of the first to ever set up PLAs and have been running them since the first week they became paid advertisements. Then again, if they ever do have a problem with my setup, I'll just remove the products that don't ship for free from the feed. If it doesn't ship free, I'm not making much off of them and, in fact, all of those non-free shipping items have bids of one or two cents (and I still get a ton of clicks from Google Shopping for those dirt-cheap bids).