AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

Do products with variants get their variants included in the feed, or does the feed only upload the main product record?

Variants do not get included as separate products. Variants do not have their own product Id. They do not have a separate product page.

But still it seems it something to think about...
Should variants be separate feed items in product feeds?

Are you serious??

That means I have about 7,000 products for sale in my store that are never included in the feeds. That's a problem.

The feed routines need to duplicate the "master" product for each variant detected using the variant name as the product name on the duplicate.

Anyone using AC7 to sell clothing or apparel will probably have only a few products and a huge number of variants. They're going to be severely handicapped with the feeds if their variants aren't included in them.

From a merchant standpoint, a variant is no different than any other product for sale. It's just being presented to the visitor in a more organized fashion.

It might be a problem with Google, for instance, to have variants included, The URLs for all the variants of a product would all be the same and hence they would be duplicates. Also, you might run into a limit on the number of links you can submit. If I had the main product at 0 price and variants for sizes, I would want the main product in the feed, but I would have to put a price on it from one of the variants so GoogleBase wouldn't reject it because it doesn't have a price.

Hmmm interesting.

I guess my thinking was along the lines that a variant would be in the feed with all the values of a regular product. The only differences would be the name, price, weight etc - basically the user-specified values of a given variant.

Let's take an example from my site: Holsters
A Leather Gun Holster will have 8 sizes and a left-hand and right-hand version. To me, that's 16 different products. They may all point to the same URL but they are different products with different product names, prices, Mfg #'s, SKU's etc.

So you're saying Google won't like 16 different product names all pointing to the same URL? Even if they have different SKU's, names etc?

Just who do they think they are?!

Yes thats right. To Google this is duplicate content and since the link points and links to your product page, the customer will be able to easily review your options.

What I am wondering is does this mean that AC has fixed the Google Feed. We just did another Manual Feed.

What about the other Feeds? Yahoo and Shopping and MSN?

Don