Unlike most other Comparison Shopping Engines, Google Base (Product Search) is free. Free for all merchants and free for consumers. Free as in beer.

With that being the case, it is very important to make sure your feed is uploading properly. It is very easy to format a small feed properly. When you have a large feed, it becomes much harder. Here are some tips & restrictions I found to be very helpful:

• there’s a limit of 100,000 items per feed-file
• there’s a limit of 15MB for a scheduled upload
• there’s a limit of 20MB for a web-based upload
• there’s a limit of 1GB for an ftp-based upload
• there’s a limit of one upload per hour
• there’s a limit of 10 registered data-feed-files

If you upload your feed via the web form in the Google Base portal, make sure your feed is smaller than 20MB. If you use the scheduled upload option, your file cannot be larger than 15MB. For really large feeds with tens or hundreds of thousands of SKUs, the best option is to generates multiple feed files and make sure they are smaller than 1GB and contain less than 100,000 items.

If you have more than a million SKUs, you will probably need to talk to Google to see if you can get around the 10 registered datafeeds restriction. Another option would be to use a Multiple Client account and break your feed into 10 feeds in each account.

Bonus Google Base Tip: “Google Base Feeds Can Now Include YouTube Video Demos for Product Search”

Image Credit: – 404 Not Found –