I have submitted a sitemap index for my site which has the location of 4 different sitemaps - http://www.sayhellobird.com/sitemap I have submitted this to Google and they say all is fine with my sitemap files, no errors or anything. In the sitemaps there is a total of almost 2800 pages (e-commerce store with 2700 products+categories+static pages+blog). However, Google says they have only indexed 8 pages. I submitted the sitemap on July 5. Any ideas on why they won't index all the pages?
A sitemap tells google about the pages, it doesn't mean it will index them. Your site is less than a year old, doesn't have any pagerank (only 7 incoming links according to yahoo). Products also have a limited description (odd url structure too) - and if they are duplicates from a feed, you'll probably always have indexing problems. Get quality backlinks from sites that are already ranking well for your keywords and give it time. You might also want to consider a $299 per year yahoo listing if it is within your budget.
It appears that you have created 4 seperate sitemaps that contain your url. Although this may work in time, my I recommend that you do it thru a more conventual means. I would get a copy of gSiteCrawler and use it. I can easly handle site your size. And more important, if you place the created xml sitemap in the root directory, Google and the other will index your site quicker.
Try get some more backlinks to force faster indexation. If you have very little backlinks Google will not sp quickly be inclided to index all URLs... Especially if they appear somewhat similar. Are you sure you have removed all duplicate/like URLs in sitemap (reason I ask is that you state it's an e-commerce site)