Setting Up Your OpenCart Product Feed with Google Shopping
One of the best ways to increase sales through your OpenCart shop is to get your products automatically listed on Google Shopping. It's pretty easy to do and will probably only need about 30 minutes, yet many OpenCart store owners don't know they should be doing it!
So you'll be enabling an XML product feed that will allow Google to automatically display your products on its product comparison website. The name of this has changed a few times from Froogle to Google Base to Google Shopping. Whatever it's called, it is another channel to get your products sold and here it is:
http://www.google.com/shopping
The first part is to enable the product feed in OpenCart. To do this:
- In the admin area of OpenCart go to Extensions > Product Feeds > Google Base [Edit].
- Set the select box to "Enabled".
- Although the feed URL in the box will be something like "http://www.yourshop.com/index.php?route=feed/google_base" the actual one you should submit to Google (later) will be "http://www.yourshop.com/googlebase.xml"
- Click save.
- Test your feed by pasting the URL in to your browser. If you see lots of text and no error messages it's probably okay.
In the second part, you will need to let Google know about your feed:
- If you haven't already, create an account in the "Google Merchant Center":
http://www.google.co.uk/merchants - Sign in to your Google Merchant Center account.
- Click the Data feeds link.
- You'll see a button to register a New Data Feed.
- Fill in the details, the target file will be "googlebase.xml".
- Save your feed.
- Go back to the Data feeds link.
- Under the Upload column, click Create next to the data feed you'd like to schedule. If you’re editing a schedule, click Edit.
- Schedule the desired frequency, timing, and location of your feed which will be: "http://www.yourshop.com/googlebase.xml" (remember to replace yourshop.com with your actual domain!)
- Click Save changes to complete the set-up process.
It will take a few days for your products to start appearing on Google Shopping.
Two things to remember!
- Check that Google Merchant Center has imported your feed correctly. If it's throwing errors, it could be that some product URLs have funny characters like "&" in.
- You should be keeping an eye on your traffic anyway but make sure you're looking at the "referrers" or "came from" data for traffic in to your site to be sure people are getting to your products from Google Shopping. If they aren't, search for your own products on Google Shopping to find out why. Are your products appearing? Are your prices competitive?
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