As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I started working on a Free Woocommerce Product Feed plugin for Google Merchant. This plugin will allow you to submit to google merchant, a product feed generated from the product information found on you woocommerce store. The product feed gets refreshed every time you add a new product. Always remember to add a SKU to your product as the SKU is used to generate the value for mpn. Please be very careful when choosing the Google Category where your product fits.
This is IT . You may download it free, but if you wish to show some support for the development of free wordpress plugins please consider making a small donation.
After you make a small donation you are taken to the download page. Or you could just use the link below to download the plugin.
free-google-product-feed-plugin-for-woocommerce
A few words about how it should be used :
Language : so far this plugin only supports english language so it’s fit for US/UK/AUS customers. I can develop it for other languages, but… there’s not time for now.
Title of the feed : is taken from the site/store title, there’s no need to change that, if you have to change that, you can edit the file product-feed.php on line 26.
Description of the feed : same as above, taken form the site description, can be edited on line 29.
Number of items in the feed : (not shown in the back end) as for now the feed is generated for ‘only’ 999 products. If you have more than that, please contact me, as going above 999 products would put quite a strain on your server (especially if you have a 32M max memory script allocation in php.ini) and another option should be considered (saving the content of the feed to a xml and using that in google merchant center)
Product Brand : it can be anything, either the real brand of the product or the name of the store. It does not matter if you don’t have a real mpn or gtin.
Product Type : somewhat important, i would go for the same categorization as in “google product category”. Remember to always use escaped characters always !
example : Software > WordPress > Plugin this is the wrong way to fill in that field
Software > WordPress > Plugin the right way to fill in that field
Google Category : the most important field, always chose a category from google taxonomy, a complete list can be found here taxonomy.en-US. Just use F3 and search for the category your product fits in. Remember to use escaped characters !
example : Software > Computer Software > Educational Software – bad
Software > Computer Software > Educational Software – good
I am more than happy to help you with any questions you might have related to this Fee Wocommerce Product Feed for Google Merchant Plugin. This plugin is not aimed at the complete php beginner , as you atleast have to know the difference between escaped and unescaped characters.
This plugin is 100% safe ! As a coder with some networking background who used to run a top 30k website (according to Alexa) I’ve spend many days fighting attacks on my servers and dedicated many articles to securing your wordpress install.
UPDATE 15.02.2013 Now the current version of the free Product Feed Plugin for Google merchant (0.35) has support for English, German and French taxonomy.
oh, also Happy Valentines day ! :) consider this a present :P
Having an issue with the plugin.
After setting everything up, I get the following message on /feed/product
“This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.”
willing to pay for this / donate , if it works.
Adrien.
That is an issue related to the theme you are using. Check the source of the feed (view source in chrome) and if everything looks good there , (you may compare it with the source of this one http://dealershop24.de/feed/products ) then you don’t need to worry about anything. Just submit the feed to google merchant and see if you get any other errors.
ps. a link to your site would help me evaluate the situation better :)
Cheers,
Victor C.
The feeds are totally different, mine shows nothing related to XML feed and i get the error “Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property ‘sheet’ of null”
I am using a Modified 2011 theme, with a child theme.
I submitted to google and zero products worked – “No items inserted”, I currently have over 150 products.
Victor,
I made the updates you suggested, and i still get the same issue. No items coming up in my feed.
Hi, Have implemented and got the feed generated but unclear on how to connect the feed with google merchant.
Thank you for the plugin.
Also, the feed was working at first – then, when loading feed page again, it was empty. To attempt to trouble shoot, deactivated plugin and uninstalled (deleted) plugin.
In reinstalling plugin the visiting the feed page returns “ERROR: products is not a valid feed template.”
Any thoughts on what could be causing problems?
Hello, have retried reinstalling the plugin and it returns an empty feed. Have created a post several times and also permalinks are active.
The environment being WP3.5.1 / Mayashop theme 1.6.1 (build around woocommerce) / WooCommerce 1.6.6.
Again it was working then it did not. Have deactivated, deleted, reinstalled, activated. And the product feed is empty.
Help and guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Hey, drop me a line on via email , or contact me via skype (you find both in the back-end section of the plugin). It’s relatively hard for me to keep track of all the comments+spam I get :)
Great plugin, but is it possible to make this plugin available in Dutch language or can I do that myself?
Thanks!
Hey Peer,
You should be able to translate it by yourself according to the syntax required by the Dutch version of google merchant. Just replace one of the languages there. (the actual words “in stock” “new” etc).
After you are done, i’d love it if you could send me the file, so we can make this available to all the Dutch people out there :) (you will be credited in the back-end of course)
Considering the fact that there are a lot of other languages i did not take under account, after i get the translations for all of them (syntax for now), i’ll come up with a new plugin that lets you select
right from the beginning where you plan to sell your products.
Thank You for experimenting with my plugin and I hope it performs well.
Hi Victor,
Just to let you know the feed doesn’t work with the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin, as the feed is overwritten with the Yoast RSS feed.
Just tried looking in the code to change the URL for the actual feed, but unable to see how this can be changed.
See here: bojotoolstore.co.uk/feed/products/
Thanks
James
I just checked your product feed. Everything seems to be set up correctly. Let us know how you fixed it and if you get any errors in the merchant account.
i’m getting error
This page contains the following errors:
error on line 32 at column 28: xmlParseEntityRef: no name
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.
How do you install this plugin?? is downloads as a .rar and wordpress plugin is asking for .zip.
I’m new to this so sorry if i’m doing something obviuosly wrong.
You could unrar it and then zip the file, or you could unrar it and then upload it using a typical ftp program (filezilla comes to mind)
sorry just found the plugin, That is a lot easier. Will try if that works…
Hello Victor,
First congratulations for this great plugin. Thank you very much for your effort. You are helping much more people than you can imagine.
Now, I have a question: How can I add more than one google category?
Thank you very much.
Ah, and how do I define different Product Category and Google Category for each product?
I also cannot connect the product feed to google Merchant. How do I do that?
Thank you very much.
Hey Victor
First, thank you for the plugin and also the previous help you gave me with product feed.
I’ve updated one of my sites to use the plugin but I’m getting an error message:
This page contains the following errors:
error on line 32 at column 27: xmlParseEntityRef: no name
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.
Also I notice in the plugin settings page I enter the code for the > symbol but when I save it reverts back.
Can you help me out? Thanks again :)
Hi,
to sum things up, you need to use escaped characters when choosing the category “>”; “&”; remove the quotes
Hi,
Ive installed the plugin, created post for the feed, save the source code as txt then uploaded it to Google merchant. However I get this error code:
http://www.ratedsupplements.co.uk/feed/products/
XML formatting error – Error
Our system encountered an error when processing your data feed. Learn more.
Examples:
Line Nr. Column Nr.
32 46
Hi,
to sum things up, you need to use escaped characters when choosing the category
Sporting Goods > Vitamins & Supplements > Health Care > Fitness & Nutrition > Muscle Building Supplements
should be
Sporting Goods “>”; Vitamins “&”; Supplements “>”; Health Care “>”; Fitness “&”; Nutrition “>”; Muscle Building Supplements
remove the quotes
hope this helps
Victor C.
Hi i have the same issue http://christiandelight.com/feed/products/
“This page contains the following errors:
error on line 32 at column 26: xmlParseEntityRef: no name
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.”
Hey SHyam, I checked out your feed an it appears to all be working now. Can you tell me what you did to fix it?
tried the above solution
I also have the same problem
This page contains the following errors:
error on line 32 at column 28: xmlParseEntityRef: no name
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.
It is all configured correctly using “&”; and “>”; instead on & and >
I am not sure how all of you are getting this to work with Google Merchant Center. I input the link in the Submit a Data Feed and it then tells me “These characters are not allowed: /, :” Which seems to contradict the usefulness of using a url submission.
Also, my feed file says file not found in the browser. So, I also need to figure out how to get this feed to get active.
http://www.tessiershardware.com/shop/wp/feed/products/‘
Any help with submission and getting the feed itself to work would be great!
I’m getting this error when I try to activate the plugin…I was trying to edit the php files myself, could that be it?
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare products_feed_rss2() (previously declared in /home2/rgh360/public_html/tacticaltechzone.com/wp-content/themes/MJ-Simple/functions.php:46) in /home2/rgh360/public_html/tacticaltechzone.com/wp-content/plugins/free-product-feed/feed.php on line 15
yes it was me trying to install the php code myself now it works…man now I regret paying $50 for the google product feed plugin.
Hi
When I try to upload the feed to Google Merchant Center I get an error message saying the feed is returning a 404 error, but when I view the feed I can see it fine.
Any ideas?
http://www.josephlanzanteproducts.com/feed/products/
I Victor
This plugin works really well, thank you.
I have one question or possibly a feature request.
More and more local currency product comparison websites are starting.
In my country(South Africa) there are a few and they only accept product prices in
our local currency but my default currency is USD.
Would be difficult to adapt the plugin to convert the price value to another currency? You could possibly select it via a drop down?
Keep well
Ryan
Thanks so much. After following the steps very carefully, I still couldn’t read the feed (404) but about 2 hours I see that you’ve written a plugin… Thanks again bro
Thanks so much. Works perfectly.
Thanks for this! I have it set up now, but I was wondering how to submit it into my Google Merchant Center? My feed is at http://www.uglychristmassweater.com/feed/products/
Do I need to create a Data Feed in Merchant Center? All I’ve done is add my business general settings.. or will Google find the feed on it’s own? Thanks again.
You need to open an account with g merchant and submit the feed url.
Okay I figured it out, sorry for the last comment.
I’m getting two errors:
1) Missing tax information
— Do I need to fill this out in WooCommerce for each product?
2) Unknown ‘google product category’ value
— I chose “Apparel & Accessories > Clothing > Shirts & Tops > Sweaters” but I guess that didn’t work.
Thanks for all your work and help.
I tried putting in the following: Shoes & Accessories > shoes
but it converts itself to Shoes & Accessories > shoes.
can anybody help me with this:
http://www.theclosetonline.nl/feed/products/
thank you!
Hi Victor,
This seems to be working great – thanks for your efforts!
The only thing is I’m not sure how you upload the feed to Google as there is no option to download and you can’t just copy and paste the RSS feed URL as Google Merchant Center doesn’t like that?
Any ideas?
Thanks.
Thanks for this plugin! It works great.
Question, do you have any plans to add variations support?
Not at the moment..maybe once I’ll be on hollyday…
Cool, that’d be MUCH appreciated if you decided to…
Hi,
Could you please share how to add local taxonomies? I found a dutch taxynomy file from google and would like to use this:
http://www.google.com/basepages/producttype/taxonomy.nl-NL.txt
Thanks!
Oh nevermind, I found it! Works great now, just had to alter some things in the feed.php :)
hi victor,
nice plugin!
I just wanted to ask, is there a difference between the plugin and the implementation as theme function?
in my store, i have set attributes such as product brand, color etc.
as i see, i cannot import that with the plugin. does it work with the code for the theme ?
thx, peter
hello dear admin
thanks for you plugin
i active this in multisite wordpress
my shop is shop.yazdkit.com and main site is yazdkit.com
in admin panel (shop.yazdkit.com ) inastall and set the setting,after that in admin show a link for feed and below that show 3 list of produce correctly!
but when i click on the feed link don’t show any thing
best regards
hi victor,
Plugins works great and the feed is ok. I only miss one field, “delivery period”. How to add this field in the feed? http://www.minixstore.nl/feed/products/
Hi Victor,
Excellent plugin. Works perfectly. I will be donating, you saved me a lot of headache.
I have an error saying:
This page contains the following errors:
error on line 31 at column 18: xmlParseEntityRef: no name
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.
Also I notice in the plugin settings page I enter the code for the > symbol as > but when I save it reverts back.
Can you help me with the solution?
Will wait to hear from you asap :)
Hi Victor,
The plugin does work but my thank you page does not work anymore when I activate the plugin. Very strange…!
When I deactive the plugin, it’s back to normal.
The website address is http://www.patipada.nl. Do I do something wrong?
Also, if you have a solution and still need to translate the plugin to Dutch I am willing to do this…
Hope you have a solution.
Tnx!
All i get is weird characters from clicking the link
Great plugin
I had a few issue with the permalink rewrite conflicting with the SagePay Form plugin, stopping the user going through checkout.
To resolve this I just commended out the plugins rewrite section at the top of feed.php Then for the feed used: http://example.com/?feed=products
Thanks
Mark