I get many emails and at times I simply can’t find the time to answer them all immediately. For this reason, I decided to write this article with the most commonly asked questions that I receive. Hopefully you will find the answer to your question, however, if not, or you require further help with your feed, contact me.

All answers are to be used as a guide, like with everything there are always exceptions to the rules and inevitable hiccups on Google’s Part.

How long after upload to Google Base until searchable?

As long as the upload is successful and displays no errors, (check the dashboard for any feedback on the feed process.) If your dashboard states this message “Published…searchable soon” then sometime within 24 hours is normal. You can keep track of which products have become searchable by conducting an authorID search http://base.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=29025. If this is your first upload I would suggest allowing slightly longer as your account will require verification.

How long does Google Base take to process data feeds?

Google notifies you after upload to allow processing time of up to an hour, at times this can be much less. Google have in the past had processing delays, so if you feel it is taking too long, you can check for processing delays. Bare in mind, however, the time to process will be dependant on item count and any potential errors. Once you have uploaded your feed a few times, you can take a consensus from this of how long you should expect, but again, this is a guide only and cannot be guaranteed.

How to change shipping on Google Base?

Shipping is easily changed within the new settings tab within your dashboard. You will find more details in my Google Announces Shipping and Tax Attributes blog post.

How to use Google Base for multiple countries?

In order to use Google Base in Multiple Countries, you must have an individual feed for each destination. All of which must be formatted properly to fit in line with regulations for each country. Currently this would include, currency, tax, shipping, language etc

I find it easier to name your feeds with location relevancy, for instance example_feed_US.txt, example_feed_UK.txt and example_feed_DE.txt

You can now set the target country for the feed within the drop down select box, where as before you were required to upload UK feeds by visiting base.google.co.uk

Now as per duplicating content this shouldn’t matter as long as the same items are in separate bulk upload file on separate regional version of google base but one thing you can do to mark your items to be treated as individual items is to add an different ID value to each.

id tag info - http://base.google.com/base/help/attributes.html#id

For a uk item add UK to the front of the ID value e.g. uk123456 where 123456 is your unique item id number and then do the same for the german version adding DE. This will help Google differentiate between them, so no item will be removed.

How to create ftp account for uploading in Google Base

You can find out more about this by reading my FTP_Upload - Google Base post.

Google base, how to specify free shipping?

You can select one of these two methods.

1. Within your shipping settings contained within your dashboard you can specify this as your default value. This is the easiest way to apply Free shipping, however this will apply to all products.

2. You can input this into your data feed in the following format.

Text Example -

US::Ground:0.00 (for the entire of the US) US:CA:Ground:0.00 etc if you only offer free shipping to certain states.

XML Example -

<g:shipping>

<g:country>US</g:country>

<g:region>CA</g:region>

<g:service>Ground</g:service>

<g:price>0.00</g:price>

</g:shipping>

You can use a combination of these if you charge for say larger items and these values will override the free shipping default value.

Hope this sheds some light.