Power Sellers Unite

elgato · Joined: 24 Feb 2005 Posts: 17237 Location: Texas

Google is now requiring that merchants go through a verification process and claim their website URL before they can submit product listings for their websites. Google's reason for the new Merchant Center requirements was to ensure that site owners are the only one submitting product listings for a site.

Merchants must first verify themselves following the instructions at Google Webmaster Tools, and then they must sign in to their Google Merchant Center account and click the "Claim this URL" link on the General Settings page.

Google Merchant Center is the new name for Google Base feeds for online retailers. Last year, Google retired the Google Base accounts of individual sellers who list on marketplaces in order to eliminate duplicate feeds, and instead introduced multi-client accounts for aggregators and marketplaces to manage feeds for multiple sellers under a single account.

more.. link to news article

ehustle · Joined: 18 Mar 2009 Posts: 621

Google is now requiring that merchants go through a verification process and claim their website URL before they can submit product listings for their websites. Google's reason for the new Merchant Center requirements was to ensure that site owners are the only one submitting product listings for a site.

Merchants must first verify themselves following the instructions at Google Webmaster Tools, and then they must sign in to their Google Merchant Center account and click the "Claim this URL" link on the General Settings page.

Google Merchant Center is the new name for Google Base feeds for online retailers. Last year, Google retired the Google Base accounts of individual sellers who list on marketplaces in order to eliminate duplicate feeds, and instead introduced multi-client accounts for aggregators and marketplaces to manage feeds for multiple sellers under a single account.

Existing Merchant Center users must verify and claim their URLs by May 18th. After that date, product listings for non-verified or non-claimed URLs will be disapproved. Visit this Google support page for more information

mojavelyn · Posted: Wed Mar 24, 2010 2:26 pm Post subject:

Here is what is not said in AuctionBytes...

You have to download a file to upload to your site... Now, I had already verified my site. And that was good until yesterday. When I got a series of feeds not accepted. 1 said internal error. Each seller on AS is individually fed. I create every subaccount by hand. And everything was fine UNTIL yesterday.

And so far I haven't found anything in the Google help forums about this.

lightning_lash · Joined: 22 Jul 2006 Posts: 367

I went to Google Merchant today after reading this and found out I was already verified. All I needed to do was claim the URL and that only took five seconds.

Although I don't remember the verification process, couldn't have been to irritating or I would have remembered.

mojavelyn · Posted: Wed Mar 24, 2010 9:19 pm Post subject:

Mine said verified too... but on the subaccounts it is coming back as unverifed.

Baconsdozen · Joined: 06 May 2008 Posts: 771

I wonder if it's all worth the bother I find I gain little from submitting stuff.

mojavelyn · Posted: Thu Mar 25, 2010 9:37 am Post subject:

Every little bit of exposure helps.

Baconsdozen · Joined: 06 May 2008 Posts: 771

I've just had all my listings rejected by Google for the third time.The e-mail is like the ones you get from ebay,a standard thing that gives multiple choices that may or may not apply.
I can't really be bothered to work out what if anything is wrong with the listings,like I said I think I get so little traffic by them that it really isn't worth the bother.
I think google is starting to get a bit too big for its own good.

mojavelyn · Posted: Fri Mar 26, 2010 11:49 am Post subject:

What are the reasons they are giving you?

Baconsdozen · Joined: 06 May 2008 Posts: 771

According to Google. it is......
"1. Bad image_links
2. Non-working URLs
3. Include image URLs
4. Wrong prices
5. Use specific item pages"

It doen't say which, if any applies to which ,if any,or all of the listings.
It's just an automatic e-mail the same sort of thing that ebay dish out.
I just can't be bothered to work out whats what,the feed was OK for over a year and I've not to my knowledge altered anything.
I don't think its worth submitting manually anyway,I get little if any trade from it.People looking for the old tools etc that I sell seem to be able to find me easily enough.

Stockmiser · Joined: 03 Jun 2006 Posts: 1169

Took me awhile to remember this verificaiton thing too.

Apparently this is something they asked for well over a year ago - maybe as long as 3 years ago. I used the "meta tag" verification method - just added a line to my main store .php file. It was so long ago, I don't remember doing it - but I do see it when I bring up the source of my main index page.

So I didn't do anything at all, and made it past the May 18th deadline, so I guess that's what they were talking about.

mojavelyn · Posted: Sun Apr 11, 2010 12:02 pm Post subject:

When I opened AS and started submitting we did the site verification thingy... then!! when they made these new changes, I had to redo it.

hotnana · Joined: 02 Feb 2008 Posts: 875

My store is hosted through HighWire...all sellers had to do the same thing. It's easy took a whole 2 minutes to get it set up! :lol:

myauctionplanet · Joined: 17 Nov 2007 Posts: 73 Location: Ellington , CT

Hello All,

We had to rework our feed even though we were verified. Google gave us an error for all our products. We fixed the feed to the new specs, but Google did not send out one email to us about all the changes. We lost the feed for 48 hours before we noticed via the automatic email notification that our member's products were not listed. Even if your feed worked before, you might have to rework it for the feed to work again. The main error was URL Mismatch after verifying.