Copyright © 2003, William Weiland
Create a flat file of your products which can be used to populate external databases, e.g. Yahoo! Product Search (beta) © 2003 Yahoo! Inc.
1) In admin, click Add Modules
2) Click the file upload button
3) Browse to find the file on your hard drive and upload
4) Click Add to add it to the domain
5) Then in admin click on Stores
6) Click the image to the left of your store name
7) Click on Utilities
8) Check the box next to the Y Feed
9) Click Update
10) Click on the link for Y Feed and fill in the configuration variables
1) In admin, click on Stores
2) Click the image to the left of your store name
3) Click the image to the left of Utilities under your store
4) Click the link to the Y Feed
5) Click on the data exporting button
6) If successful, the file path will appear as a link
7) Save to your hard drive, then FTP to Yahoo product submit
The module will attempt to resolve images for your thumbnails. If you use the full path url for images in your store, it will use them. If you use a virtual path below your Merchant2/ directory it will add the root directory for graphics that is defined in your admin domain settings. If you preceed the image urls with ../ it will replace the ../ with the domain root you define in the Y Feed module's admin.
Note: All categories will be skipped until you change the word "skip" to anything else in the module's admin. For each that is changed from "skip", the products in that category will be exported to the flat file. Uncategorized products will not be exported. The category name and hierarchy will be built from the category code at the beginning of each line. You can override this process if you provide a hierarchy for the category name. When a > appears in the category name section of each line, the module assumes this is the hierarchy you want to use for the product. It is probably best to use this override if your category names are non-descriptive. For example if your category in Merchant is "Blender" you may want to build the hierarchy like: Home & Garden > Kitchen > Appliances > Blender While your store may only sell kitchen appliances, the Yahoo! Product Search does not know that and will not be able to categorize your products properly. Yahoo! also suggests that you provide a category to match their categories. You do this in the Y Feed module by putting a : at the end of your Merchant category name(s) and follow that with the Yahoo! category name. Here is an example line in the input:
1AA=ok=Software:Computers and Software > Software|
Inactive and deleted products will not be exported. Products with zero quantity will be exported. The presumption being that if they are exported they will be searchable in indexes. Once the customer reaches your store, it is up to your policy to decide what to tell them. This way, products will not be missed by search engines just because they are out of stock the day the export is run.
Products will be included in the datafeed even if they are in availability groups and are supposed to be restricted viewing. You can prevent this by ensuring they only appear in categories which are skipped or are not in any categories (as above).
You may find the affiliate code generation useful, even if the file is not going to an affiliate. By creating a dummy affiliate account, you can track where sales are coming from by checking the affiliate commissions.
When you run the report, be sure the file name in the first input is called data.txt This is a change from the original submission requirement which was for a file called datafeed
When you run the export, if you only have one store in your domain and do not expect to add more stores to it, it is recommended that you check the box to suppress the store code. If you do add another store, you can always re-run the export, adding in the Store_Code.
After running the export, the link will appear in the admin window. That link uses another window to display your text file results. When you go to that other window, be sure you refresh/reload the screen as the previous export may still be in the cache.
You FTP the file per Yahoo's instructions. More info about the FTP and product submit can be obtained at Yahoo.