Fast Facts About Froogle

How can you create your own data feed?

The following is pretty specific to my scenario but I thought it might be insightful and helpful to let you know exactly how I created my data feed.

Creating the data feed is no small task if you aren’t a programmer (and I’m not), however it’s not nearly as hard as it sounds. At first, I decided to go into my shop and simply copy and past. We have over 150 products, so after the 10th product I decided there had to be an easier way. Fortunately, there was (or my wife would have divorced me around the 75th product!).

Our site uses a MySQL database, so I probably could have contacted our programmer to write a small application that would automate this process but, as I was anxious to get started, I decided to do it myself. After all, it was Sunday night after 10pm and I wanted to get a jump on the week -- always the best time to make rational judgments!

We already had a small PHP application that listed all the products in our shop. The only big problem was that it listed ALL the products, not just the products in stock -- and it was missing a few fields. I started tinkering with the application and after a while I got it to list everything I needed. The only two issues were that it was still listing all the products whether or not they were in stock, and it was not in the tab-delimited format I needed. At last I figured out how to at least add a field at the end, to specify whether the product was active.

Next, I decided to tackle the formatting. The application I was using displayed the products in one big HTML table. So I removed all the HTML tags in the application and put in pipes (or “|”) to separate each field. This proved to work quite nicely, and I now had a page displaying a pipe-delimited flat file. The next part was pretty easy. I copied the text out of my browser, dropped it into a text file, and then imported into Excel. Once I had all the data in Excel, I removed all the products that weren’t in stock, and outputted a tab-delimited text file for the data feed.

How can you upload the feed?

Now the easy part: uploading your data feed. Using WS-FTP I uploaded the file the way Froogle specified (as username.txt) and emailed them to tell them the upload was complete. The file wasn’t that big, so I decided not to compress it, and just uploaded the file directly.

I finished all of this around 2:30am and by that afternoon they’d approved my data feed. The email stated that the feed was approved and that it should appear on Froogle within the next few business days. Needless to say, after all that work, I was pretty excited about the potential business this could drive to our site. I kept checking the site periodically, and by late evening our products were listed. That was quick!

I realized after the upload that some of the images in the data feed were dead links. Froogle handled this really well by automatically putting an “Image not Available” graphic in for those dead links. I should also mention that Froogle resample all your product images to 90 x 90 pixels -- and they do a great job at it.

All in all, the whole process was quite easy, and I believe Froogle might become the next big thing for ecommerce. If it says anything about Google, it shows they’re innovative and on top of new emerging markets. And, though I have yet to see one single sale derived from Froogle, I remain optimistic. And anyway, the feed only appeared last night!

Good luck to all you future “Frooglers” out there!