Google shopping variant products

[Jan]

I have been looking at the March google shopping requirements for their shopping feed this morning and think that the only way to implement this is to use permutations linked to products.

There are two main problems :

1) each variation must have it's own unique ID, this could probably be generated but would have the potential to be more meaningful if it could be entered against an option.
2) each different colour or pattern must have it's own picture

This information is not available for sellerdeck products unless you create hidden products for each variation and link them to a permutation or attribute with the product.

Have I missed something, can anyone else see a way to do this?

Regards,

[Jan]

Also for variant items it is recommended that the url given will automatically select the variant specified - can this be done in Sellerdeck?

Regards,

[Mike Hughes]

I think you're right Jan. From the sound of it, you will need to create a unique product for each variant if you want to be able to assign unique images, product IDs, etc to each one.

I don't think Selelrdeck is capable of linking to a product with a variant preselected as standard but you can probably do this in javascript by looking for a variable in the link to define which option to select. I'm not sure it will make much difference to the customer and would probably only be worth it if you also presented the right image for that option, which is a whole new kettle of fish.

Mike

[nileshpa]

Jan,

I believe the approach you are proposing is the right one i.e. treating each variant as a separate product but linked together. We are in the footwear trade and in addition to our website, we sell through Amazon merchant seller. Amazon expects each variant (size/colour combination) to be unique and insist all the attributes of each variant to be defined including images. We do the same on our ePos system as well so its easier to manage & export the products.

Unfortunately, within Sellerdeck, the fashion matrix implementation isn't that user-friendly. At present, on V11, we have to hide these variants products and to create the master product & manually fill out the component, attribute & choice tables.

BTW- On SD2013, I want to try to have all variants visible but use filtering to display actual products available in store.

Hope that helps.
Nilesh

[Jan]

Thanks guys.

Unfortunately a lot of Sellerdeck / Actinic customers don't use the hidden product approach, I have had calls from several customers who are worried about how they will continue to list on google shopping.

I am wondering if I can just generate unique ids and images names based on either option position in the list or option names and then people can provide the appropriate images. I think that even that might be too much work for most people to implement though. I can see this update causing a lot of people to stop listing.

The good news though is that it is only a problem for people listing in the apparel category and you can still get around things by only listing a few of your key products to get around the data entry issue for large numbers of products. For a lot of people the variants will be optional.

Sellerdeck : Are there any plans down at the Towers to enable the extra data required to be provided for variants without using the hidden product approach?

Regards,

[fergusw]

I have had calls from several customers who are worried about how they will continue to list on google shopping.
,

The continued updates from Google Shopping is affecting more and more merchants.
All this is in the run up to Product Ad Listings, which makes me especially curious as to how Google are going to handle the transition from free to paid Google Shopping listings........

Regarding a way to display the image of a variant when accessing a page:
One way would be, on a product page, to append the URL with a query string which javascript would intercept and then display the relevant image accordingly (and possibly select specific variant drop-down/radio button).
This would be achievable, however it would require some tweaking of both the Google feed and the HTML on the product page....... one to develop perhaps?

[Jan]

Hi Fergus,

In the past when new policies have come into play Google have been quite brutal but in a very random manner, a good example is when they decided that we have to have just one product per page, some people were immediately removed that had more than one products and others were able to carry on listing for 18 months or more. This involves money though and so it will be interesting. They have a lower spending limit for the google ads of £100 a month as well which will also cut out smaller customers. They have trialled this in the states though before making it mandatory here so I can't see anything changing.

Regards,

[maroni35]

Has anyone found a good article on how to actually impelment one of these new product listings ads. The stuff from Google is like treading through treacle. How unclear can they make it. Of course all of this is for our benefit as they state. Whereas a free, easy service obviously wasn't.

[fergusw]

Of course all of this is for our benefit as they state. Whereas a free, easy service obviously wasn't.

How very true!!
We're putting a couple of Blog articles together for our clients, but I'll pop a link to it on here once it's live, so you can have a look.

[Jan]

To link to ad words, all you need to do is go to your google shopping account and enter your ad words account id. The other charges are only required if you list on the apparel category. there are three ad words keywords but you only need to use those if you want to link certain products to certain campaigns and for tracking.

Regards,

[maroni35]

Thanks Fergus and Jan, I have now linked adwords and merchant centre. Found that the information on doing this was harder from the merchant centre side than from the adwords side. If you choose product ad listing is does give you better help. Have then been able to filter on brand so that I don't show all my products but test with one subset. But the price per click to even appear looks huge. Have a similar text add and about a tenth the price!