Windows LIVE product upload... anyone using it???

[FiberGuy]

... if so, perhaps you can help!  I seem to be getting a few thousand (yes, thousand) errors that say:
"Offer rejected: Contains fewer columns than the catalog header."

I keep staring at my spreadsheet, referring to the lines that were rejected and I can't figure out what the problem is. 

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On a side note, special characters (á, ê, ö, etc.) also receive erros... something that Google Base seemed to have fixed some time ago.  This isn't a big deal, as I just do a find and replace. 

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Anyone? 

Cheers and TIA!

[amy]

We just started uploading to it (translation: an automated Zen Cart mod was released recently) but I've never looked at Live Upload's manual .csv spreadsheet format.  The Zen mod creates/uploads an .xml file.

[FiberGuy]

Major solution:  Remove all quotes from the spreadsheet before uploading.  It shouldn't matter in a tab-delimited file, but hey... we are talking about Microsoft.

It takes about 20 minutes for my editor to chew through 4500 lines and remove the quotes.  What a pain.

[amy]

Dear Merchant,
Catalog TulipStuff! successfully published at http://products.live.com
Your catalog TulipStuff! has been published at http://products.live.com. Your offers have the following status:

Total no. of Offers 7938
Published Offers 7913
Offers with Errors! 25

To view your detailed catalog status or to make any changes, visit the Live Product Upload website.

I can live with 25 errors. 

[FiberGuy]

[quote author=amy link=topic=16004.msg64396#msg64396 date=1188611208]

Dear Merchant,
Catalog TulipStuff! successfully published at http://products.live.com
Your catalog TulipStuff! has been published at http://products.live.com. Your offers have the following status:

Total no. of Offers 7938
Published Offers 7913
Offers with Errors! 25

To view your detailed catalog status or to make any changes, visit the Live Product Upload website.

I can live with 25 errors. 
[/quote]

Yeap... I could too!  That low of a percentage isn't worth trying to find a tweak for.  My last upload still returned 5 errors (for special characters that I missed), but I'm not going to fiddle with it any more.

Do any of your listings contain quotes?  That seems to be the problem I was having.

[amy]

My listings don't have any quotes.  Apostrophes have been my big punctuation nightmare (I lost a couple of customers because of an apostrophe related bug in one version of Zen's authorize.net mod  ).

[FiberGuy]

[quote author=amy link=topic=16004.msg64429#msg64429 date=1188684603]
My listings don't have any quotes.  Apostrophes have been my big punctuation nightmare (I lost a couple of customers because of an apostrophe related bug in one version of Zen's authorize.net mod  ).
[/quote]

UGH...

Almost everything we sell uses quotes in the listing, mainly for dimensions. 

On a slightly curious note... I just noticed that the Windows Live product feed has been active since last year!  :o

I think they have the Redmond Junior High computer club working on it, so it should turn out OK. 

[FiberGuy]

OK - What the heck is Microsoft doing?  Do they know? 

The shopping link above the search box doesn't work on the MSN home page and is nonexistant on the live search page.

PLUS - the product search is absolutely nowhere to be found now.

*** OK, the shopping tab is working now ***

That still leads me to wonder after a year and a half, WTH are they doing with the product search?  It's invisible.

Go Redmond, Go!

[bargainbloodhound]

the product search?  It's invisible.

That would explain why we rarely receive visitors from it.  ;D

[amy]

Proof of invisibility 

(figures are number of referrals our TulipStuff store received from each engine last week)

Google Search 1273
Google Products 1169
Live Search 703
MSN Search 38
Yahoo Search 28
TheFind 16
Shopping.com 12
Ask 9
Live Products 2 :blinkie: