Google product feeds are required to include Unique Product Identifiers to be accepted

[JeffPyeBrook]

Feeds must have values for two out of the following attributes: gtin, brand, mpn.

Because GTIN is more of a big company thing by default we should include the other two elements.

[leewillis77]

Hi Jeff,

Just to flag that there's already a 3rd party extension that adds all of the required fields / logic to the feed.

http://plugins.leewillis.co.uk/downloads/wp-e-commerce-product-feeds

The feed requirements can be met with the filters already in core plus some code to create the values.

When the feed code was originally committed to core, listings in Google Shopping were free if you uploaded a feed to Google Merchant Centre.

However now there's no real result to sending a feed to Merchant Centre unless you also take out PPC ads with Google, so not sure it really belongs in core anymore unless we think the majority of our users are running PPC ads? [My opinion is obviously a bit biased here].

You should also bear in mind that the product feed specification is changing at the end of September so if you're planning updates you'll need to take those changes into consideration if you're not already working from the updated spec.

I'm going to stay out of these discussions past this point, since I have somewhat a conflict of interest :)

[JeffPyeBrook]

@leewillis77: Thanks Lee, I did know about the plugin, I have one as well. Just thinking that if we have it in core it should minimally work out of the box.

I think it should come out of core altogether. It's my take from the new specification that it will soon be the case that there is no way to automatically generate a valid feed without some level of admin work anyway. Google product category requirement being one example.

[benhuson]

My opinion is it shouldn't really be in core moving forward. Particular now you have to do PPC ads to gin any benefit and more-so if Google Product Category is a requirement.

I think 3rd party stuff should only be in core if it can be guaranteed just to work out of the box with minimal or no configuration.

I'd prefer to see most 3rd party stuff moved out of core and into plugins (especially now the WPEC API is becoming more robust) so they can be managed and worked on separately when updates are needed and could possibly help to attract more developers to work on these specific areas of functionality/integration as they will have more contained (less scary) codebases :)

[JustinSainton]

:+1:

[JeffPyeBrook]

So if we are in agreement on this one how about I deprecate the google product feed functionality for 3.9 and we publish the shell as a sample plugin for the community?

[JustinSainton]

Go for it.