Member Avatar for jewboy

I have a client with a shopping cart in an older version of Marketlive. It does not have any shopping feed functionality built into it.

My goal is to create a feed to crawl the site and submit the store's products to Froogle, Yahoo Shopping, and the comparison engines.

This is my first time doing a project like this. What is the best course of action to take? Need some guidance.

Thank you.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by phpguy001

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A practical approach that works long-term for older carts like the one mentioned by is to build a small, disciplined export pipeline rather than relying on ad-hoc crawling.

Start by creating a single canonical product model (SKU/id, title, description, product_url, image_url, price+currency, availability, brand, mpn/gtin, condition, shipping/tax, sale_price, last_updated). As hinted, each channel needs different output; keep one normalized source and map that to channel-specific templates (Google, Bing, comparison engines). Server-side generation from the DB or application layer is preferred; scraping product pages should be a last resort because it breaks easily and misses structured attributes.

Produce the feed on a schedule (cron/task scheduler). Write timestamped, gzipped XML files and expose them via HTTPS or push to a merchant API. Include per-item last_updated and consider delta feeds (only changed rows) to reduce bandwidth and speed up reprocessing by channels. Log validation errors and keep a small test feed for quick checks.

A minimal Google-style XML item looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:g="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0">
  <channel>
    <item>
      <g:id>SKU12345</g:id>
      <g:title>Example Product</g:title>
      <g:description>Short product summary.</g:description>
      <g:link>https://www.example.com/product/SKU12345</g:link>
      <g:image_link>https://www.example.com/images/SKU12345.jpg</g:image_link>
      <g:availability>in stock</g:availability>
      <g:price>19.99 USD</g:price>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

Troubleshooting and gotchas: use UTF-8, set Content-Type correctly, escape XML special characters, ensure price includes currency (e.g., "19.99 USD"), provide valid GTIN/MPN when available, and avoid HTML in titles. For : add a boolean or tag field (eg. export_flag or price_group) to filter which SKUs appear and schedule regular regenerations so price changes propagate automatically. Start with a small sample feed, validate, then scale.

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Member Avatar for stymiee

Each feed is different as each shopping site has their own format for feeds. You will need to go to each site and find out what format they are expecting and create each feed separately.

Member Avatar for phpguy001

i want to create a shopping feed whereby i can display certain prices of certain products (say software). How can i do this so i dont have to do any thing but program the damn thing!?

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