With the transition of Google Shopping to a paid model well underway the importance of managing your budget and where it is spent is obvious. What is equally important is maintaining the quality of the data feed that is passed to your Google Merchant account.
In the first of this three part series, we look into integrating Google Shopping API with Magento Go.
Recently we were tasked with setting up a Google Shopping feed for one of our Magento Go clients. Having already set up quite a few of these for our Magento Community clients (Which I will write about in a future blog post), and knowing how awkward it can be, I assumed that it wouldn’t be possible in Magento Go.
Thankfully Magento have had the good grace to integrate Google API including Google Shopping into Magento Go. While this makes the process easier in some respects, it still throws up some issues along the way.
Recently a client of ours asked if we could add a Facebook Like button to all of the products on their Magento Go site, the idea being that when the button was pressed it would then add the link to that particular product to their Facebook page.
In Magento Community this wouldn’t be too much of a problem, however this particular site is a Magento Go store which doesn’t have the same amount of customisability or extensions. A quick search of the Magento Go documentation brought up a page showing how to add social networking links to Magento Go through a static block, but no reference to what code would be needed to actually connect to Facebook.
While developing a Magento store, we came across one of those head-scratching moments where everything looks right yet still refuses to play nicely. This time around, we had added a media image attribute for an alternative view of the product. This was to appear in the category product list when a visitor hovered over an item. However, after adding the attribute (code: alt_image), reindexing the catalogue (Product Flat Data) and uploading a file, calls to $_product->getAlt_image() in catalog/product/list.phtml simply returned NULL, despite coming through fine in catalog/product/view.phtml.
This is the story of how we fought Magento’s UI and recovered our missing images.
Ben Pethullis
Jamie Stead
Dajve Green