If we are not told otherwise, we will be treating all products in your Yahoo store as new. In some cases your Yahoo store may be selling products that are either new, or used or refurbished. In this case, we can make special arrangement (at no extra charge to you!) to send your Yahoo store products to Google Base as new, used or refurbished. In order to implement this special arrangement, your Yahoo store table will need a special custom field created called “intecca-condition”. You will then need to to fill out the condition for each of your product in store editor. Our program will use this field to collect the appropriate product information and send it to Google Base. If you are not sure how to create that custom condition field - it is not a problem at all! Just let us know and we’ll gladly create it for your store at no extra charge!

It is very easy to unsubscribe from any subscription service you may have ordered from Intecca. Just use the button below, login to PayPal site, enter your credentials and confirm your cancellation. Your subscription will be canceled instantly.

We are constantly adding new fields to our feeds. Currently the following fields are sent:

• Product Name
• Product Description
• Product Condition
• Product Type
• Product Weight
• Product URL
• Product Image URL
• UPC
• ID
• MPN

Stay tuned for more fields. Check out our news section for the latest.

The way Yahoo Merchant shopping cart software handles images is such that when Yahoo Merchant store is published, it may change URLs to your images. If you are submitting your products to Google base manually or using a manually created spreadsheet, you may need to revisit your images URLs every time you publish your Yahoo store and update them. For a handful of items this may be doable (although somewhat time-consuming). For many hundreds or thousands of items this task becomes a real drag on your resources. Spending hours on updating your image URL’s after each publish? - hmmm maybe not, thank you.

According to Google’s own admitting, Google Base Connector software for Yahoo Stores (Yahoo Merchant), will not work in some cases. For example, it will not work with Yahoo legacy store. Also, Google Base store connector for Yahoo Merchant will not work if you have any HTML tags in your product descriptions, options, names. In addition, since Google Base Store Connector is a standalone desktop software, it may be susceptible to capabilities of user’s own PC and internet connection. Particularly, we have often noticed that the software just timed out while collecting information from larger Yahoo Stores.

Our product upload service requires your Yahoo store Product Catalog catalog to be enabled. A simple way of checking if you have it enabled or not would be visiting a URL which looks like this: http://www.YOURDOMAIN.COM.catalog.xml where YOURDOMAIN.COM is the actual domain of your Yahoo store. If after visiting this URL you receive a long screen of xml statements - you are in good shape! If you are getting an error message or short 2-3 lines of text like “This store does not allow catalog contents to be exported” then you need to enable Product Catelog option in your store. You can follow a few simple steps outlined by Yahoo Merchant Help here.

The answer to this is very simple. We encourage you to subscribe for our product feed service. It is free for 30 days. Usually after several days Yahoo store owners know whether our service underperformed, met or exceeded their expectation. Judging by our cancellation ratio, we are doing pretty well! Wouldn’t you want to find our for yourself?

Once you subscribed, your products will appear under your Google Merchant account withing 12-24 hours. After 2-3 days you can begin checking out your Google Merchant account area for visitor and impressions stats. This will give you a rough idea of amount of viewers, visitors and potential buyers Google Product Search is sending to you for free!

It depends on how many items you have, how desirable your items are and how well your products will be positioned in Google Base. Lets address these factor one by one.

1. How many items does your store have? When you submit your product feed to Google Base, your items will appear in both Google search results and Google Base results. Let’s say, you are getting an average of 5 visitors per item per day. If you have 10 items, you’ll get an extra 50 visitors per day. If you upload 100 items, you’ll receive 500 visitors per day. 10,000 items will theoretically bring you 50,000 daily visitors. So the next natural question is: how can you be sure that I’ll get 5 visitors per item per day? Well, this brings us to the next traffic factor:

2. How desirable are your items? It is pretty normal to assume that the latest digital camera will interest more people than a spare tire for 1982 Buick Regal. So theoretically the amount of daily visitors from Google Base may be 500 people in a digital camera case and .001 person for Buick’s tire? Theoretically - yes. Practically - not neccessarily. Do not be fooled by this factor and think that selling digital cameras on Google Base will necessarily bring you tons of visitors and make you tons of money instantly. You have to always ask yourself a question:

3. How well will your products be positioned in Google Base? The answer to this question depends on a very simple thing: COMPETITION. How big is your competition? If you are selling the latest digital cameras, chances are there will be tens or even hundreds of other stores on Google Base selling exactly the same model of digital cameras. Chances are that many if not most of them will match or beat your price. Does this mean you shouldn’t even try digital cameras? By no means! What if the demand on these cameras is so huge that you still have a piece of the pie left!? On the other hand if you search Google Base on “1982 Buick regal spare tire” you’ll see 0 (zero) result. Does this mean that you should drop everything you do and get in the business for spare tires for 1982 Buick Regals? Absolutely not! Should you try it? Yes! What if there is a decent-size undiscovered market for these spare tires?

Conclusion:You should try as much as you can. However, as you do try, keep these ideas in your mind. Start small, see if it works. As an online retail entrepreneur you should never quit doing one thing: trying. Increase the prices. Lower the prices. Add new items, remove some items. Always keep trying. And always analyse the results. Keep the successful techniques and do not hesitate to get rid on the unsuccessful ones. It is your business, work hard on it.

In Yahoo’s defense, they are probably following up on their statement and do send product feeds to Google. But they cannot control or guarantee what happens on the receiving end of their client’s feeds. In some cases the process works, in some cases it does not. In other cases it works but not accurately.

For example sometimes not 100% of all products are submitted or submissions are not occurring regularly and as a result the product data becomes outdated. Another example of two services not really clicking together would be when Google Merchant introduces a mandatory product field which may not necessarily be present in Yahoo Services. As a result many stores feeds are simply denied based on the absence of the variable. I can probably come up with quite a few more examples of disconnects between the two Merchant giants.

We at Intecca try to bridge all these disconnects between the 2 services; and I must admit it has been working out really well for our clients.