VirtueMart Forum

VirtueMart 2 + 3 + 4 => 3rd party extension => Topic started by: sealion on April 06, 2012, 12:59:50 PM

Title: GoogleBaseXML - Generates Google product feed for your Virtuemart store
Post by: sealion on April 06, 2012, 12:59:50 PM
This Component generates a product data feed for your Virtuemart store. This feed can be uploaded to your Google Merchant centre account.

http://www.spiralscripts.co.uk/joomla-components/com-googlebasexml-detail (http://www.spiralscripts.co.uk/joomla-components/com-googlebasexml-detail)

The product listing generated by the component is in XML format, and can be manually uploaded, or submitted to Google Merchant Center for scheduled upload. Once uploaded to your Google Merchant centre account the feed can be used for Google Product Search, Google Product Ads, and Google Commerce Search. The product feed supports the all specifications required by Google and also supports all the optional attributes such as size and color (except for loyalty points and installments attributes). The feed can also support product variants using Virtuemart child products.
Title: Re: GoogleBaseXML - Generates Google product feed for your Virtuemart store
Post by: antonitus on June 13, 2012, 17:42:00 PM
Why do we need to purchase this product. VM should be including this as part of the package.
Title: Re: GoogleBaseXML - Generates Google product feed for your Virtuemart store
Post by: sealion on June 13, 2012, 18:42:48 PM
Why should you not expect to buy this product? You plan to use it to make money I assume, so why should we as the developer not be allowed to make money out of our very hard work producing this extension?

In any case we are not part of the Virtuemart development team, we are 3rd party developers.
Title: Re: GoogleBaseXML - Generates Google product feed for your Virtuemart store
Post by: antonitus on June 14, 2012, 10:45:30 AM
True, my apologies, yesterday I was annoyed by one of the companies at the time who was charging an extortionate price for this add-on, you seem to be reasonable. Anyhow I'm thinking of purchasing it from you at some point as I am going through a testing phase. I was mainly annoyed that there were no evaluations I could download to test this feature as I am new to the Google product search feature.

Also, I am not making any money from this part as I am doing it as a favor to my brother-in-law.
Title: Re: GoogleBaseXML - Generates Google product feed for your Virtuemart store
Post by: sealion on June 14, 2012, 10:53:52 AM
I would be interested to know if other companies are selling our component! Could you give me a link?

Unfortunately it is not possible to make an evaluation version available, it would conflict with the GPL license that the Joomla extensions directory insists on.

Apology accepted, your annoyance is understandable.
Title: Re: GoogleBaseXML - Generates Google product feed for your Virtuemart store
Post by: antonitus on June 14, 2012, 12:53:34 PM
Sorry, what I meant to say was that another company was selling a similar product to yours.  Your one looks better, however I wouldn't know without evaluating them both.  Is your one specifically targeted at creating a Google product search XML/csv file, etc.  I only want to post one product at the moment and then some more at a later date when products are stocked up. So really I should try to create a manual csv file instead.  The only part is the tax and shipping rates on Google product which confuses me as I thought all that info would come from the VM shop itself.

Thanks for your understanding. I feel like a lemon now.
Title: Re: GoogleBaseXML - Generates Google product feed for your Virtuemart store
Post by: sealion on June 15, 2012, 20:16:02 PM
Hopefully our product is better - it is designed specifically to work as a Google product feed, rather than just being a general xml feed, so we went to some trouble to make it possible to supply all the info that Google requires in its specification. We have had good feedback from users, saying that it works well.

Depending on how your shipping works it is usually better to supply the information directly to the merchant centre. With weight based shipping the feed component supplies the shipping weight so that should work.

With tax it depends what your target country is, for the US the prices submitted should not include tax, for the EU they should include VAT. The component parameters allow you to choose whether you want to include tax on the prices.
Title: Re: GoogleBaseXML - Generates Google product feed for your Virtuemart store
Post by: mbit on July 03, 2012, 18:47:09 PM
There is not a free versions of a script that does same work?
Title: Re: GoogleBaseXML - Generates Google product feed for your Virtuemart store
Post by: sealion on July 04, 2012, 12:51:44 PM
No. I think it is very unlikely you would find a free version.

We put a lot of work into making the feed match EXACTLY the google feed specification. This is necessary because Google have very strict requirements about this, it the feed does not match them Google will reject it.

Plus we keep updating the product feed so it deals with problems that arise whenever Virtuemart is updated.

I don't think anyone would want to undertake the headaches involved for nothing.

Our product feed is very reasonably priced. We provide support for it and we get good feedback from customers. Why should you expect to get all that for free, when you will be using it to make money yourself?