Shopmania feed

[graphicz]

Forgive me if this is in the wrong part of the forum.

Is the xml feed required to submit to Shopmania the same as the Googlebase xml feed or is it the same as any of the feeds produced by Jan's (mole-end.biz) product mash?

Apparently the shopmania feed needs these headings and the separator is the 'pipe'

Category | Manufacturer | Model | Merchant Code | Product Name | Product Description | Product URL | Product Image URL | Price | Currency '

Thanks

[Mike Hughes]

The best thing to do is ask on Jan directly via mole end. If it makes sense she might even create a feed especially for shopmania.

You can contact her via the 'contact us' page here http://www.mole-end.biz/cgi-bin/mf00...CTION=SHOWFORM

Mike

PS. Jan. Why is there a video on a welsh holiday cottage on your Actinic Marketing tools page?

http://www.mole-end.biz/acatalog/One...Marketing.html

[graphicz]

Thanks Mike

I did drop Jan an email as well. I will update this post when I learn more.

[Jan]

I did reply yesterday actually, I said that the feed have the same information as the google base CSV feed but in a different order with different titles. I gave you a link to a site giving information about how to change one to the other - I won't post that here because it's from an Actinic competitors site, you should have it in your email.

Regards,

[Jan]

PS. Jan. Why is there a video on a welsh holiday cottage on your Actinic Marketing tools page?

http://www.mole-end.biz/acatalog/One...Marketing.html

Lol - I had my site redesigned and forgot to take out the sample video - best do that now, thanks for pointing that out. That place looks quite good mind you, although the video is a bit wobbly.

Regards,

[graphicz]

Thanks Jan. I don't check office emails over weekend. Sorry to annoy and thanks for the advice.

[Jan]

I wasn't annoyed, I just assumed that the email had gone into spam as they so often do but thought it was worth posting the info here for any other readers.

Regards,

[graphicz]

I am still having some grief from the client re this Shopmania Feed. I made the feed using the example headings and the Googlebase.csv feed but it was rejected. Two possibles:
The Category field was empty.
I selected " as text delimeter which put quotes round URLs.

The Categories should really be the section containing the respective products but the Googlebase feed does not include sections. I could probably make a feed from the exported hierarchical csv but this would take a liitle thought/time and the aim is to have a relatively simple method that I can teach the client to do. Incidentally, if you use Open Office Calc instead of Excel, there is an option in 'save as' to define the delimeter as a pipe.

Incidentally, here are the instructions for creating a Shopmania feed without referring to another site

To export your products to Shopmania.com:

1) Do a Googlebase Mash as csv

2) Open the Googlebase export file in Excel

3) Create a 2nd blank spreadsheet as well.

You will be basicaly copying columns from the Googlebase file to the new blank spreadsheet.

Here is the format of the shopmania feed:
Category | Manufacturer | Model | Merchant Code | Product Name | Product Description | Product URL | Product Image URL | Price | Currency

4) Copy the columns to their respective columns in the 2nd blank spreadsheet, following the format given above.
(leave missing data blank, e.g. missing model / manufacturer codes).

5) Once you have the 2nd spreadsheet completed, you'll need to export the file to a pipe (|) delimited file. Excel doesn't like doing this by default.

6) How to set your delimiter symbol to pipe (|) from comma (,):
a) Open the Windows Control Panel
b) Click on Regional Settings
c) Although the next actions differ slightly on different versions of Windows, find the "Numbers" section and find "List separator".
d) Change the comma to a pipe |.

Note: if you use Calc the Pipe is a 'save as' option.

You might have to close and open excel again to make the change take effect.

7) With the shopmania spreadsheet open, select "Save As" and choose "CSV" comma delimited file.

8) Open the saved CSV and doublecheck that the commas are indeed pipe characters for column separating.

Does anyone have an example Shopmania feed they can post?
Thank you everyone

[Jan]

You can export the section tree using the macro !!SectionTree!! from the product mash - you could put this value into the brand or condition box to get it added to the feed and then you just need to change the title.

If you want to make this easy for your customer, create a spreadsheet with two worksheet, put the feed results into one and have the other reference the first on and rearrange it, change headers etc. Then all your customer would need to do would be to import the feed onto one sheet and export the other.

I would have expected quoted fields to be fine so it's likely to be the missing category that is causing the problem.

I can look at adding a Shopmania feed into the product mash but won't have time to do it until May at the very earliest.

Regards,

[graphicz]

!!SectionTree!! Produced exactly the right paths for Category. I have sent the revised file to the client and shall report the outcome. Thank you Jan.