E-Commerce Development

Working with Magento as we know can be frustrating, especially when you don’t know why some things happen. I guess that can be like life too. Anyway, we’ve been using Magento with Google Base (Google Merchant Center) for some time now, and every once in a while, we’d get the following error message: Expected response code 200, got 400. Type: data. Field: app:draft. Reason: Disapproved items cannot be published

Wouldn’t it be great if it gave some details as to why the items are “disapproved”? We’re not selling any adult related materials, no drugs, no body parts. We would love to tell you we discovered that on line 889 of file app/Code/Core/Mage/GoogleBase/Block/Adminhtml/Items/Renderer/Id.php had a bad section of code. Anyone that may be new to Magento, that file does exist, that deep into the file structure! SO back to the mystery. We don’t know what causes it, but it appears it has to do with using Magento’s “Duplicate” feature for product creation. Not sure why, because we don’t always get the error for every duplicated product.

So now, whenever we get the dreaded:

Expected response code 200, got 400. Type: data. Field: app:draft. Reason: Disapproved items cannot be published

We drill down through our list of Google Base items till we find the exact offender, we go to our product management section, we copy descriptions and other data to our trusty word editor and then…… We delete the offending bugger!

We then make a brand new product, plug in all our data and then goo back to Google Base management area in Magento and publish the new product.

Hey, not very glamorous or earth shattering, but it gets the job done so we can get back to work!

When I click on the Google Base ID (the number listed in orange next to your product name) I get an error page from Google that says:

Oops
We didn’t understand that.
You have tried to access a non-existent page.

I have seen where some people have created scripts to submit to Google Base and Shopping.com, but I would MUCH prefer that Magento interfaced with the items and I could use Magento to add, delete and monitor the items I submit to Google Base.

This is the fix that we found after some searching:

The URL that magento is using for Google Base products is outdated. The products are being submitted – the link is just incorrect.

Open app\code\core\Mage\GoogleBase\Block\Adminhtml\Items\Renderer\Id.php

and change the line that reads:

$baseUrl =’http://www.google.com/base/step2offer?docId=’;

to

$baseUrl =’http://www.google.com/merchants/view?docId=’;

That should cure the Google Base eror message of your product not being found.

If you want to get your products listed with Google Base or Google Merchant Center, you’re going to have to know your Google Base Product Type. Problem for us is that Google is VERY limited when they offer product types and a lot of them make no sense, but oh well, Google seems to be king!

Here is the link to Google Base Product Types.

Like I said, a lot of times the product types don’t make sense, but I don’t think it matters as long as you do it Google’s way. For instance, we sell quite a few Backup Cameras For Trucks. We’ve always listed them as a Google Product Type of “Vehicles & Parts”, but the best we can tell, we’re never listed under Shopping results with Google. We’re now thinking about trying “Vehicles & Parts > Automotive Audio & Video > Car Video Devices”, but not sure if that will work. Someone has suggested they should be here: “Vehicles & Parts > Automotive Audio & Video”. Or should it just go here: “Vehicles & Parts > Automotive Interior > Dashboard Accessories”? We’ve even had suggestions of specifying them as “Vehicles & Parts > Automotive Interior > Dashboard Accessories”.

I guess we’re going to try different ones and see which ones get results.

If any of you are having problems with data feeds from Magento to add products to Google Base or what is now referred to as Google Merchant Center, here are a few things we have come accross:

When you are setting up Google Base Attributes, a few things should be known.

In case you’re interested, according to Google, you have to have the following attributes:

• id
• title
• link
• price
• description
• condition

Then, according to Google, they suggest the following attributes for Google Base items:

• gtin
• brand
• mpn
• image link
• product type
• quantity
• availability
• shipping
• tax
• feature
• online only
• manufacturer
• expiration date
• shipping weight
• product review average
• product review count
• genre
• featured product
• excluded destination
• color
• size
• year
• author
• edition

We found the above information on google.com here.

We haven’t tested this out completely in Magento, but can say this. We played around with attributes and when trying to add a product to Google Base, we got this error: Expected response code 200, got 400. Type: data. Field: title. Reason: Duplicate title. Type: data. Field: link. Reason: Duplicate url

Turns out Magento by default apparently adds those attributes automatically to the feed. So if you have Google Base Attribute “title” specified, get rid of that. Next if you have Google Base Attribute “link” specified, get rid of that too. If you specified image location attribute, get rid of that too, Magento does that for you.

That should fix the error message. We’re now playing around with the Google Base Attributes and deleted all of our products (over 4318 of them) from Google Merchant Center and have begun to publish them with our new attributes sets which include shipping,manufacturer,product type, id, model number, description, brand, price, condition and gtin.

We’ll probably play more with others, but right now we’re anxious to see the results from this test.