Yahoo catalog export to Google Merchant Help

Hi,

I have a basic yahoo merchant account.

I am finding that submitting my catalog data to google merchant is becoming very time consuming. The Yahoo store will easily export the catalog data into a spreadsheet but it will not (according to tech support) export the image location.

Yahoo claims the image location is dynamic and changes everytime you publish your store. So in short, I download the catalog and then have to re-input every image URL to match every product URL. This gets really tiresome with hundreds of products.

Yahoo claims they are working on the issue but this is going on for months.

Does anyone have a work-around or does anyone know how to export the product URL and the yahoo image URL into one spreadsheet and have it match accordingly?

Thanks!

 

Why don't you have a standard location of image URL on your own end, and use that instead?

 

I tried that. That too became very time consuming when adding and deleting products. Every time the catalog is exported all the image locations need to be re-inserted. If I am overlooking something, I am all ears.

Was thinking of parsing the XML file because that feed has all the image data in it. In fact, the feeds submit the image URL to the search engines but it is not exported in the catalog format. For some reason, Yahoo says it is impossible. However, even though they say the URL image link is dynamic, if you type in an old image URL you still get the image, so why go through all the extra labor for a google merchant submission. It looks like google merchant only makes one pass to snag the image. So I do not think it makes a difference if it even changes on Yahoo's end.

There has to be a better way. Your help and advice is appreciated. If I can't find a better solution than I might have to find a hosting solution that provides a more robust reporting/catalog feature.

Maybe I am being to selfish to think that there must be a way to generate a simple spread sheet that says
"Your product URL is this" and the "Product Image URL is that" all in two nice aligned columns.

 

You should have a standard URL to fix this problem.

 

That is Yahoo's standard answer as well but exporting a spreadsheet with hundreds of items and matching them to individual image URL's is not a practical use of time.

Guess the answer is to dump Yahoo and go with a provider or program that can offer that flexibility

thanks for the feedback