[PAID] Google Merchant Static Feed

[pitorian]

Martin,

Since ticking the boxes for Free Shipping the google base is not showing these items as free shipping, or indeed including the shipping quote, as you are aware google is now pushing all merchants to provide shipping quote, or free shipping, can you advise how to get the free shipping, shipping quote included in the export.

Thanks

Chris

[Martin]

Since ticking the boxes for Free Shipping the google base is not showing these items as free shipping, or indeed including the shipping quote, as you are aware google is now pushing all merchants to provide shipping quote, or free shipping, can you advise how to get the free shipping, shipping quote included in the export.

Shipping information nor Tax is currently supported yet as I've wanted to nail the existing bugs before hitting the next development phase. I seem to have got to that point though so I'll tackle that soon. No definite date but probably middle of next week.

[pitorian]

Thanks Martin just nudge me when you have a workable version, we can see all the competition in our niche displaying the free shipping and tax info now, causing us a few issues with clicks falling off, keep up the great work.

Chris

[Martin]

Thanks Martin just nudge me when you have a workable version, we can see all the competition in our niche displaying the free shipping and tax info now, causing us a few issues with clicks falling off, keep up the great work.

Will do... I watched my own feed drop off the planet when the lack of UPC information (ie: I hadn't put my UPC data on each product) obviously kicked in...

The free shipping information shouldn't be too hard to add and I've a pretty good idea of what the tax side of things will require as well... Actual shipping cost info' is going to take a little longer but to be honest I think I've licked most of the really hard stuff (ie: BIG product numbers and timeouts) so hopefully (he says, hugging a large group of wood like trees) it should be relatively easy...

Anyone care to place any bets?

[pitorian]

I just wish you good luck

[Martin]

Right... Looking at the issue of retrieving the shipping cost information, I've realised I spoke waaaaay too soon.

The problem is that the feeds are country specific but the shipping system in Google Checkout can drill down to states/provinces and even specific zip codes which creates a massive problem if all I want is a single quote (the cheapest presumably) for just the one country.

So, we have a number of problems...

The shipping quote system relies on you have a FULL shipping address as part of the getAvailableShippingMethods() function to get an array of methods and quotes. In fact it seems to rely very heavily on whether or not you have an order with address, etc... Hmm... The word "nightmare" springs to mind.

It should be possible to modify the function to use a $shippingZoneId if provided to the function (and not get a new address) but it will mean that anyone using the feed will need to have a country specific shipping zone and method setup for each of their target feed countries. Somehow I can't think this would be a massive problem but it won't be fun.

However, the function relies on being passed the items for which the quote is being generated... The information comes from this line:

Code: Select all

list($shippingQuoteItems, $fixedShippingCost) = $this->getShippingQuoteItems();

Looking at it further I think this might be the way forward...

1. Custom function looks for a Shipping Zone that is a country based zone for the feeds target country and grabs that as $shippingZoneId
2. We call getAvailableShippingMethods(true, true, array($productData, $shippingZoneId)
3. This is modified to:
   • Send $productData to getShippingQuoteItems() so it in turn will use this instead of getItems()
   • Use the $shippingZoneId and not attempt to identify it from an address (which we don't have)

The above is VERY rough and I'd need to play to see if I could actually generate a quote instance without needing address information, otherwise I'm going to have to pass arrays rather than use the existing object calls, etc... Somehow I doubt it, but we'll see...


Right once we've done ALL that, we have all the quotes handily returned to us by getAvailableShippingMethods() as an array in order of cost so we should then be able to grab the first array field price as:
$shippingQuotes[0]['price']




Quite a lot to get my head around... See, told you it was a bad idea to say that it was all going to be "easy"... Stooopid!!

[pitorian]

Hi Martin how did you get on with this, any further forward

[Martin]

Hi Martin how did you get on with this, any further forward

Had to sort out a problem that was affecting stores with 5.5... so didn't get much further and unfortunately a lot of my dev' time has been focused on my KashFlow module for ISC as my accounts are still very overdue.

So, short answer, not yet... It's on the list though... Just hoping there's a simple enough answer in there somewhere!

[Martin]

Was intending to release this as was without any new fixes, but customer found a problem for 5.5.0 - 5.5.4 versions of ISC.. and a unique issue with the category data (unsure if it's version specific).

Both issues have been fixed and the lack of problems, beyond requests for the new GM feeds, means this version is now considered a "stable" release..

Version 1.3.0 : Revision 330

• FIX: Resolved issue for 5.5.0 - 5.5.4 so that product image links are now pulled out correctly
• ADDED: If catparentlist is NULL in categories table, code now generates the information from parentid data
• FIX: The above fixes an issue where <type> data wouldn't appear when catparentlist wasn't populated

[Martin]

There's always something isn't there...

Version 1.3.1 : Revision 331

• FIX: File lock and handle released when feed completed
• FIX: Feed Rename will now succeed (thanks to flock release)
• ADDED: Windows operating system/host now detected
• FIX: Windows feed path now backslashed to reduce issues with fopen()

Overall this version resolves a number of issues with Windows Server hosts...