Google Product Feeds - New Requirements

[applesofgold]

We are in the jewelry industry, and for Google product feeds, we list our products under "Apparel & Accessories > Jewelry".

As of the new Google feed requirements, they are saying that we have to choose a gender and color for each product that is in the Apparel category.

While this makes sense for clothes, it doesn't exactly for jewelry because many items are for both men and women, and there's not always a color associated with each product.

I can enter some of these fields manually, but with 5,000+ products, it makes it difficult w/ each update.

Anyone have solutions for this? Or a way around it? Can we just include those fields but leave them blank?

Any other solutions?

[edwardlewis]

How are you creating the feed? is it all done manually?

If you arent already it would be a good idea to look into auto generating the feed, that way you would be able to set rules at say category and sub category level or take more information about the products from your product database.

The more information you get in the feed the better, eg will imporve the optimisation process.. and automating it should also mean it takes much less of your time to manage it

[icecarats]

Definitely echo the suggestion about looking into automating feeds. I've got a couple thousand SKUs affected by this as well and I would go nuts if I had to do it manually.

You could leave it blank but Google might reject those products, especially as they've marked the field as 'required':

http://support.google.com/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1346661

Google is obviously also going to favor the more information rich feeds.

EDIT-

Sorry didn't realize you might not know how to do that. The Google feed is pretty straightforward; you just have to render an XML file from your database. That link I put up above should have the info in it for the spec, it's been forever since I coded mine.

Your ecommerce platform might support it too; for example I think osCommerce, ZenCart, e.g. the popular open source ones, have plugins to render Product Feeds.

[applesofgold]

we are auto-generating the feed, but our shopping cart doesn't differentiate between different genders and what color a piece of jewelry is, so any added fields like that we would have to add in manually.

To alleviate the issue, for now, we put unisex for the gender and "metal" for the color and it seemed to take.

[applesofgold]

it is automatic. thanks. see above reply.