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Group: Forum Members
Last Active: Mon 21 May 2018
Posts: 94,
Visits: 266
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Amazon have started selling a Google Adwords type service called Product Ads. Their idea is based on the Google Shopping idea where Amazon customers search for a product within Amazon and get fed options to purchase from third-party websites along with Amazon's own results. If a customer clicks on the third-party website link, the third-party company get charged a PPC fee. Simple....except their product feed isn't quite Google compatible.
An Amazon rep sold me that Google feeds were compatible with absolutely minimal integration, blah, blah, blah....and asked me for our Kartris generated XML file which he turned into an Amazon feed.
When I came to change website prices, those prices had to be reflected on the Amazon Product Ads feed. Without going into details, this was an absolute nightmare and required a ton of editing. they don't accept XML files so you are transported back to the early days of hand-editing a horrible CSV file to suit, just like in the bad old days of Froogle.
Currently, the Kartris Google feed will only seem to generate as XML and won't do tab delimited (Amazon are still in the Stone Age favouring this sort of file) so here's a suggestion for futire releases of Kartris:
Can we have a feeg generator for Amazon Product Ads please?
It's hard to ignore Amazon, they are huge players in Internet sales (pioneers really) and charge horrendous fees to business' wanting to sell on their platform, so their Product Ads service is a fantastic compromise for business' running e-commerce sites who want to benefit from potential Amazon traffic. Something to think about guys?
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Group: Forum Members
Last Active: Mon 21 May 2018
Posts: 94,
Visits: 266
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Here's Amazon's reply to my request for them to take Google XML feeds to their Product Ads service:
I am sorry to hear that you are experiencing such issues.
While we do try to make the process of using Google feeds as easy as possible, all our XML XSDs and feed processors are optimised to provide our databases and systems with necessary information, to change processing format would require a complete overhaul of all our systems which we are not currently in a position to make such a change that would allow Google XML to be processed without any conversion.
While we do understand your frustration with consistently modifying a feed so that it is compatible with any external system as it is not only time consuming but it can be quite frustrating. We would recommend to have your system produce the information in the Amazon format at the same time that the Google feed is being generated.
I do apologise for any inconvenience caused by this but I do hope that this helps.
They do not take XML feeds and only deal with CSV or TXT format. as you see, they believe that the onus is on the developers of shopping cart platforms to create the facility to export product feeds to suit Amazon in the same way as platforms already tailor their feeds for Google.
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