We wanted to customize our Google Base feed, so as recommended by AC, we signed up with GoDataFeed. So far it has been two or three weeks, and we are getting error message from Google every day. It has been pretty frustrating.

First of all, we did set up some custom attributes. (By the way, the drop-down menu option of the custom field still does not save properly, but that is another topic.)  GDF does not format your attribute titles for you, so you will need to format them yourself exactly as Google instructed before you send them over, otherwise, you get a broken feed.

When we sent the attributes over, we explained that some of them have fixed values and some of them will have values from AC API. After two days, we had an error message, and found GDF put the one fixed value to the attribute title. So, we had to tell them to fix it.

The next day, we found our tax and shipping attributes are not correct. So, we have to go back, find out how to format the value for these two attributes, and send it over to GDF again to fix it.

 Then, we found there are 18 of our attributes missing values! For sure we have the information, cause it is on the product pages, so we had to open another trouble ticket with GDF. They said they will need to talk to AC, but did not give me a time frame. It has been two weeks and our feeds are still broken!

 Their custom service is nice and they reply the trouble ticket pretty fast, but every time there is an error in your feeds, it is about 24 hours turnarond time, which means you lose at least two days' sales. It is really frustrating for me at this moment, and I wish I could just do it myself , as I have done all the homework on the all the attributes. GDF claims that they are effective feeds management and they optimize, but the truth is they do upload your feed, but they do not even check what is in there. If we did not look closely, they would have been uploading our feeds with blank or wrong information all the way through.

Help someone else here would have a better solution.

Hi Vivian,

I completely understand your frustration with this and I'm sorry its been this rough.

To address your concerns:

Custom Fields Drop-down: This issue was corrected and if it is still pending for you, your site likely needs an update. Eric has responded to your support ticket on this - so please update the ticket to let him know. Once we have a confirmation from you on that, we can schedule your site for an update to get the fix out to your site.

GoDataFeed: As per your request through the support ticket, I have contacted GoDataFeed earlier today and I'm awaiting a response. I have emailed their Support Manager as well. I will update your ticket with the response.

I am confused about the issues you are mentioning about the attributes. I have very recently (probably no more than 2-3 weeks ago) setup another site I personally manage with GoDataFeed and I use several custom fields. I have not had any issues at all with the setup nor with the submission process. I did see a drop in traffic for a day but that was more of an error on my part when moving the feed than anything from their side. Once I corrected the error I was back up to the regular traffic we were receiving earlier within a day.

I am not sure what has happened in the setup of your feed....but as soon as I hear back......I will keep you posted on what I get back from GoDataFeed.

Manjula
 

I'll add my review to the mix here.

 I've been with GoDataFeed for 2 months.  Their tech support is great and Ro was a huge help getting me started.  I'm now signed up with about 8 feeds, some free, most paid.  I found that many of the feeds advertised on their site are not really accessible to average stores.  Several feeds were closed to new members, some were prohibitively expensive ($750 buy-in), and others do not accept FTP uploads, which GDF requires to work.  I tried to set up about 20 feeds and ended up with 8 successful ones. 

 However, maybe this is just my industry, but none of the new feeds (I had three that I was already doing on my own, so I have 5 new ones) are giving me anything.  I've spent several hundred dollars by this point for ZERO coversions.  The only conversions I'm getting are from my first three feeds, which are probably the most popular portals anyway (Froogle, Shopzilla, Become.com)

 I have decided to discontinue GDF when my month is up in a couple more weeks.  In this economy, I can't afford to be bleeding money.  I've given it 2 months...seems I should have had a least one new sale, but I have not.  Everything is configured correctly, our reporting is working fine.  I'm getting hits, just not conversions.  Again, this may just be my site or my market.  If I was getting some new sales, I'd be thrilled to continue using GDF.  I like how well the "set it and forget it" works.  It's definately worth trying out if you have the time to get it going.

GDF has been a good time saver for us, and it's producing incremental sales.

I thought I would point out I have logged a reporting/tracking bug between AC and GDF.

We have also logged many hits within GDF admin, but no sales/conversions.

The only way we've been able to identify these sales at the moment is via AC reports which list the referring feed.

GDF have determined the issue is with AC, and Dustin is due to look at it.

Cheers

Manjula,

I really appreciate your help. It has made it much easier.

I would not expect this much time spent on getting the custom fields straighten out. The custom field feature was easy to use on the AC side (except for the issue AC is working on now), but for some reason, GDF has had problems with the values for these attributes.

And, a general note for the feeds reports, maybe some of you would consider this very basic: Our Google base has been saying success upload every day, and our products are showing up in the product searches. We would have ignored all the errors if we did not checked the data quality and feed details. We found soooo many errors there that it is scary. So everyone doing feeds, spend a couple of more minutes on the details of the information you upload to the sites.

NGB:

I thought I would point out I have logged a reporting/tracking bug between AC and GDF.

We have also logged many hits within GDF admin, but no sales/conversions.

We discovered this problem, too.  GDF and AC worked to get it fixed right away.  We are reporting conversions now.  But the only conversions we're getting are from Froogle, which we already had set up and working for us before signing up with GDF.

 I don't want to discourage anyone from trying it.  It's a good program and the customer service is great.  Just didn't work for us.

The only problem I continue to have with GoDataFeed.com is that the API access password and user ID for GDF appears to change by itself every so often. The API login address, also changes on it's own. I have no idea what makes that happen, but it has already happened 3 times. It seems that it happens when I add new products to my inventory. So far, no one has been able to figure out why this happens. I know I am not changing it, so this is something that must be happening when software updates are done, or on the GDF end. At first I thought that the passwords had to be changed periodically for security issues, but that is not the case.

One of the AC techs is working on this. Given the frequency its not a real ball buster, but some what of a periodic nuisance when it does happen. The good thing is, I finally figured out how to fix it when it happens.