Hi Betty,
Your decision should depend on the amount of products that change
within a given time frame.
If you are using the shopping feed (ex-Froogle) by Google then you
should have an unique key or identifier for each product within YOUR
feed.
This could be the SKU, Manufacturer Part Number or Bar Code (EAN13,
ISBN13, UPC-A etc.).
If the product catalog is pretty static and changes very little
throughout the year, you probably want to use a feed only for the
initial upload and for an occasional full-refresh.
Changes in inventory and price could then be done via the API during
the rest of the year, between the refreshers.
For price or inventory updates is it not necessary to send all the
other product data, such as description etc.
1. Don't know the answer to this one. Google needs to answer it.
2. If you configured the feed and ping Google to update it, it should
do a full refresh = items not in the feed that you sent will be
removed
Put that is only my assumption, but that would be the only way it
makes sense.
Otherwise retailers would be in trouble, because they would have
to remove invalid items that are not part of their product catalog
anymore manually.
3. I would think so
4. dunno
5. because their are also other uses of Google Base, where it is good
to have a real-time web services API to update content
6. APIs and Data Feeds have each their own advantage and problems and
are suited best for various scenarios that do not conflict each other
or overlap.
There are instances where it makes sense to use a feed and others
where it does not, but the use of an API does.
There are also scenarios where using feeds and APIs in conjunction
makes the most sense.
Rule of thumb: Bulk, Large Amount of Data, Less Frequent = Data
Feed (Delimited, not XML) / Immediate, Smaller Amount of Data,
Frequent = Web Services API
I wrote a short article several years back about this subject, see
http://www.cumbrowski.com/CarstenC/articles/20060909_XML_Datafeeds_and_Webservices.asp
Cheers!
Carsten
On Dec 22, 2:29 pm, Betty <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am having difficulties in making the following choice:
>
> use bulk data feed or gbase api to maintain clients store inventory in
> gbase
>
> background:
> I am an experienced programmer, I have over a couple of years
> experience with adwords api and other search engines apis
>
> questions:
>
> 1. is there any functionality that the api offers and can't be
> acquired by using datafeeds?
> 2. if I initially add 1000 items using a data feed, then after 1 day
> submit a feed with 10 items, what happens? are the 990 items paused/
> deleted?
> 3. if i submit another feed with the same 1000 items, but some of them
> have some attributes changed - will the existing items be changed?
> 4. are statistics shown correctly if I use a data feed?
> 5. why should someone use gbase api if just building a good feed is
> enough?
> 6. why would google offer an API (which includes different platform
> support, examples, etc), if all can be done by scheduling a data-feed?
> I mean, besides queering the snippets feeds, the rest of the API seems
> like a luxury from programmers for programmers. correct me if i am
> wrong
>
> thanks in advance,
> Albert
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