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Here’s a quick guide on how to set up a Google Base Product feed for your Shopify store. For more info, visit the Shopify Forums.

1. In the Shopify admin, go to Assets > Theme Editor. Under the Templates heading, click “Add a new template.”

2. A form will appear that says “Make an alternate version of Blog called alternate.” Change ‘blog’ to ‘page’ and ‘alternate’ to ‘googlefeed’ and click Create template.

3. You will now see an item called “page.googlefeed” listed under Templates. Click on it to edit it, and paste in Fortune Cookie Soap’s code for Google base, replacing all of the existing content for the template. Note that you will want to change the expiration date to 30 days from the present date. (Anything more and Base will give you a feed warning due to Google’s limits on expiration dates.)

4. Save page.googlefeed and close the code window. Click on the Blogs & Pages tab and click ‘Create a new page.’ For the title, type Google Base Product Feed and leave the ‘write your page’ section blank. Click Create page.

5. Once it has saved, click the Edit link, and on the right side under Template, change ‘page’ to ‘page.googlefeed’ and then click Update page.

6. Go back to Assets > Theme Editor, and under Snippets click ‘Add a new snippet’. In the box that appears, type in ‘shopdesc’ (after Make a snippet called…) and click Create snippet.

7. Now that the shopdesc snippet has been created, click on its icon under Snippets to edit. Type in a line or two describing your store, as this is the store description for your feed, and click Save.

8. You also need to make sure that you have a Collection called ‘All Products’ so that your Base feed will have all of your products in the one feed. To make a collection with all of your products, go to the Collections tab and click ‘Create Smart Collection.’ Type ‘All Products’ for the title and under Set your conditions, select ‘Product price’ ‘is greater than’ and type in .10 (for ten cents). If you have another criteria which works better for you, by all means use that. Click Create collection, and the page will refresh with a listing of all of your products A-Z.

9. Now in another browser tab, you should be able to view yoursite.com/pages/google-base-product-feed . Note that Firefox will automatically try and subscribe this page (since it is an RSS feed) to your default blog reader, so I recommend Safari, which will display the feed right in the browser window.

**Note** I removed {% if product.type != ‘Sample’ %} and {% endif %}from the page.googlefeed code because I did not need to differentiate the sample. I also removed the line <g:payment_notes>We also except Paypal and Google Checkout</g:payment_notes> because I do not accept Paypal or Google Checkout either.

Finally, once you have confirmed your feed is working, you can go to http://base.google.com (whiled logged into a Google/Gmail account you want to associate with this feed), click Sign in to Google base, accept the terms of service, and fill out the Account settings, like store name, description, site URL, business address, and contact info.

Once those fields have been completed, you will want to add a New Data Feed. Select your target country, your item type will be ‘Products’ and for the ‘Specify the data feed filename’ put google-base-product-feed without any file extension. Click Register data feed.

On the following page, under ‘Upload schedule’ click Create. Schedule the feed to update daily or weekly, depending on how often you add new or change your existing products. For ‘Url of file’ put the full address of your feed, e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/pages/google-base-product-feed and click Schedule. You will receive an email update when the feed is submitted, with any errors or warnings once it has been completed.

Your odyssey into the world of product feeds should now be over for now! Enjoy your Google Base. Many props to Fortune Cookie Soaps for the code and innovative work!

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