I wrote earlier about using eBay RSS feeds to automatically update google shopping products. This no longer works due to an error with eBay’s coding.  Google now require the condition to be specified (new/used/refurbished) but eBay does not send this in the correct format so updating automatically from feeds no longer works.  Ebay are using the <condition> tag which applies to text files rather than the <g:condition> tag which applies to feeds.

You now need to upload to google base manually.  Go to the webage where your feed is located (as detailed in the previous article), for example mine is:

http://esssl.ebay.co.uk/GetListings/allgiftsdirect?fmt=g

Save the page from your browser and then open it for editing, wordpad will do fine. Simply find and replace all instances of <condition> with <g:condition> and all instances of </condition> with </g:condition>.

Save the file and upload it to google base.

Alternatively there are websites where you enter your feed web address, they alter the code for you and then allow you to save the file to upload to base:

UK site builder is one example I have tried and it works.

Perhaps one day eBay will fix their code so we can all go back to doing it automatically. Is this not what we pay our fees for?