Anyone know how to get TheFind to automatically pull feeds?

[LavMyst]

I am using TheFind and was paying GoData over $100/month to upload to google and TheFind daily for me. Since Google went to a pay scale we stopped using them but still use TheFind, and started using Laeity to upload to TheFind for us. However when using Leity we found that they use their own account to upload our items not our account, so we lose our Upfront status on TheFind.

So I have been trying to remember to upload the feeds myself, but I keep forgetting... so does anyone know how I would setup the "Scheduled Fetch" or "FTP" options so it would be automated? I know it might sound like a crazy question but I really cant seem to figure out where I would point TheFind to get the info without me giving it to them myself, and their Help page is not very helpful.

[Toobusy]

I'm interested as well, I upload manually

[1000jewels]

Since we don't have the ability to auto-generate product feeds in 3dCart, I don't believe that there's anyway to automate the process.

[cbsteven]

You can do scheduled product exports with custom delimiters, headers, and constant fields. You can use that to approximate feeds for many services although it is not perfect.

[Shopguy]

I'm working on this now. I setup a custom export and scheduled it. I manually uploaded it the first time to make sure TheFind likes my formating. One issue I forsee though is the extension of the file. To do a manual upload I had to change the extension from csv to txt. Not a big deal to do manually but I'm not sure how TheFind is going to handle it with a scheduled fetch. I've tried changing the extension of the file in the schedule export screen but it reverts back to csv. I've told TheFind the file name with the csv extension I guess I will see in the next couple of days if it will take it.

If it works I'll post back with the results.

[Shopguy]

So it seemed to work. I took some screen shots to show how I set it up. They should be pretty self explanatory if you'd play around with it a bit.

Link to the importable fields for TheFind:
https://merchant.thefind.com/doc/The...cification.pdf

You may also want to note that the feed will take any hidden items you may have. I haven't looked into it yet to see if there is a way to prevent that.

One note to make sure you entry your proper URL in the settings on TheFind. I put an 'x' in for mine so that the rest of the field was visible for the screen shot.

Another note. TheFind says that they will fetch your feed around 9am but they pulled mine at basically noon (central time). I have my export set for every eight hours to catch any changes I may make during the day.

Edit: I just pulled basic data for the export but now that I know it's working I'll start adding more fields. You'll want to look thru the list of available attributes and determine what's appropriate for your store. Also note that I used extra fields for some attributes, yours may be different.

[rrw]

Shopguy, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to post that, along with the screen shots--it works great! I have been doing this manually, every week, for so long because I couldn't find a good tutorial on how to automate it.

Thanks again!

[Shopguy]

I'm glad you found it helpful. I've gotten a lot of help on this forum and try to give back where I can.

The one thing I'm still struggling to figure out is how to exclude hidden items from the export. There is a setting in Settings>Gerneral>Store Settings to ignore items that are non-searchable from feeds but that doesn't work for standard exports. If anyone figures out something for that I'd love to hear it.

[cbsteven]

I ran into this before and it was a big part of the reason why I wrote my own programming to export feeds.

The problem is if you have your Waiting List or Backorders enabled. Then the feed will show ALL items as being in stock, even those with quantity of zero.

The feed will only report stock status properly if you have Waiting List/Back Orders totally disabled.

[wcsjohn]

We're doing our own tools to manipulate the product export and send to the various places that require the feed.

[Shopguy]

So the method I've found to exclude certain items using the scheduled export is make sure that they are rejected by the feed engine. Most of the items that I am currently trying to exclude are items that we aren't stocking yet so I just deleted the names. TheFind rejects and I'm waiting now to see what Shopping.com does but I'm confident that they will reject them too.

So what tools are others using? GoDataFeed just seems to pricey to me for what it offers.

[cbsteven]

I use a VBScript to download product data via the 3DCart Advanced API, process it, and then write the desired product feed file. I do this for Google Shopping, PriceGrabber, Bing, TheFind, and Amazon.

Took hours to set up and requires programming ability, but it is free and endlessly flexible.

[windycityparrot]

Google shopping

I'm curious why you left google shopping - we're paying .13 a click with a CPA of about $3.50 -

[Instant Video Games]

Hello Shopguy, thanks for this.

What did you choose for the delimiter?

Thefind requires tab, but it appears that tab is not an option.

Thanks,
Walter

[Instant Video Games]

Wow.

I was going to proceed using / but when I went back, the options were changed to the words.

Odd.