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Data feeds
A data feed is a like a web page, but it is meant to be read by a computer, instead of a human being. Comparison Shopping Engines like Yahoo! Shopping, Google Base, Shopping.com, PriceGrabber and also Free Wine Searcher use data feeds to receive product information from merchants. It is a file containing all wines you are selling. If you already have a data feed for other search engines, we can probable reuse it without the need for you to change anything.
Most web shop software is able to create a data feed. It is a matter of installing an extra package if it is not already installed. Some examples:
- osCommerce has free packages for download (see for instance here or here).
- x-Cart can export to CSV files.
- Zen-cart has free packages for download (see here).
(Note: if you have problems generating a data feed, please contact your Internet Provider or Web Master. Free Wine Searcher cannot help you as we don't know all the different types of webshop-software.)
A data feed must contain the following information:
- Description of the wine, including all information needed to exactly identify a wine ("Meursault 1er Cru" or "Veuve Cliquot" are not accurate enough, because the producer and cuvee are missing)
- Vintage (1 vintage per line). If you stock more than one vintage list them as separate wines.
- Bottle size (preferably like "75 cl" or "1,5 l." instead of "bottle" and "magnum")
- URL where people can buy the wine. This must start with "http://"
- Price per bottle
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- Optionally any other fields like appellation
Depending on the type of data feed, this information goes into an XML file or a CSV file (also called flat file). Free Wine Searcher can process Google Base, Shopping.com, MySimon.com and Yahoo! Shopping feeds, and any other CSV file.
For CSV or flat files, the fields should be separated by a special character, this can be semi-colon (;), comma (,), tab or the pipe symbol ( | ). Each line contains a product (a specific wine). The first line must contain column names. So basically, it could look something like this:
Wine Name|Price|Vintage|Bottle Size|URL
Chateau Lafite Rothschild|215.99|2003|750ml|http://www.acmewineshop.com/winedetail.php?id=13
Rieussec Sauternes|42.99|1996|375ml|http://www.acmewineshop.com/winedetail.php?id=44
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