Lots of folks still aren’t syndicated, no news on the end date for getting everyone included–but we will see a lot of new shops there soon–see below.

Those who are syndicated have been having issues for several months–sold items in the feed, wrong prices, wrong photos, most items missing…. Syndicated sellers should see those issues clearing up now.

If you are syndicated & your items still aren’t showing properly*:
Admin have said you can re-enable them for upload to clear out the old bad data and re-submit your items–see here for the quick method (quick to do, but it took several hours for my missing items to start coming back):

It seems all my items are back in Google Shopping, including more than 30 that had been missing there for months.

Google Shopping now sees all our tags:

It still uses just the first three Etsy tags to set the ‘product type attribute’, but now that they will get all our tags in addition to the titles & descriptions, anything that would be a problem for Google Shopping’s rules can’t be anywhere in the tags either. That means things like free shipping will need to be removed from your tags if you are syndicated and the items aren’t showing up in Google Shopping.

While that is bad news for many, because the words ‘free shipping’ can be good in regular internet searches & Etsy’s searches, the good news here is:

If you offer free US shipping:

$0 in the shipping profile of your listing will now make your item searchable using the free shipping checkbox on Google Shopping search results which wasn’t functional for Etsy sellers previously.

Vintage = Used:

Before this change items with vintage for the first tag on Etsy automatically were labeled “used” on Google Shopping because they were 20 years old or older (or at least should have been that old) and everything else was labeled new.

Now any item with the word vintage in any of the tags will be labeled “used” on Google Shopping even if it is in the handmade or supply categories on Etsy.

Sean11 has gone so far as to state “If an item of yours is not more than 20 years old, please do not use the “vintage” tag”–see that here. I have asked if that includes multiple word tags (like ‘vintage inspired’ or ‘vintage components’) but didn’t get a response yet.

New round of syndication coming up:

While Google hasn’t given enough access for everyone to be syndicated they have given Etsy more room and another round of shops will be added soon, a nice big chunk too (100,000 more shops!)–here’s hoping they start with the older shops that are still active first for a change of pace.

Voice your support for syndicating older active shops before brand new ones here: http://www.etsy.com/teams/7714/ideas/discuss/8630304


*Need help finding out if all your items are showing up in Google Shopping? See here:

Log in to Etsy and:

1. Go to “Your Account“.
2. On the left, under “Promote” there will be a link for “Syndication” if you are syndicated.

If you aren’t syndicated the word won’t even be in the list of “Promote” links.

On the left side of the page you’ll see links to all the sellers on that page (click “more” if you don’t see it). Click the link on the left for your shop name–see my shop link in the yellow oval:

Click for a larger view

I searched 48 Clear plastic earring post findings, clicked the link on the left for my shop.

5. Now to get your seller feed number:

In the address bar you’ll find the address for that page–most of it will be gobbledy-gook. See how it looks in the address bar here–in the yellow oval is my seller number:

Click for a larger view

Copy the whole web page address for your page to a word processor to more easily find your seller number. Mine is highlighted in purple in the web page address here, it is prefaced by the word seller and a colon:

http://www.google.com/search?q=48+Clear+plastic+earring+post+findings&hl=en&tbm=shop&source=lnt&tbs=seller:7152851&sa=X&ei…

6. Take that number put it at the end of the webpage address below instead of the XXXXXX and you should be taken to a page with just your items uploaded by Etsy:

http://www.google.com/products?q=&authorid=XXXXXX

Mine looks like this:

http://www.google.com/products?q=&authorid=7152851

7. The results page will show how many of your items are currently in Google’s Shopping/Product search:

Click for a larger view

8. Once you have that address working for finding your items, bookmark it in your browser for easier finding in the future.

The good news:
Today LisaJune posted in the Etsy forums about a new Etsy employee to work just on the Etsy/Google Merchant integration (yay!)
and
she’s started a new thread for the problem that some sellers using vacation mode have had with items not being put back in to syndication when they came out of vacation mode (which appears to be a problem on Google’s end, not Etsy’s)–see here for her thread:

The bad news:
I haven’t heard anything new about when Google will be able to get all shops syndicated. Last I heard is a forum post back in April that said Google still can’t handle all Etsy items through their new Marketplace Partners set up (here).

(((Knocks wood that all my fellow sellers will be syndicated soon!)))

Appearing/Disappearing Syndication Link:

• Having the link in Your Etsy doesn’t mean you are syndicated unless you clicked it and it said your syndication is active.

• Deactivating/activating your items won’t change the status from pending to active, it only helps once your status is active.

• Some sellers, like myself, have had the syndication link go missing, yet we are still syndicated. If you missing the link and want to check your status, see here: Etsy has Started to Syndicate Shops

More info about syndication:

Google uses robots (spiders) to follow links from page to page (crawl the web) to index sites to use in their regular search results. ( http://www.google.com ) The majority of shoppers come through Google’s regular search.

Syndication is only for Etsy uploading our items to Google Merchant Center to get into Google’s special shopping/product search ( http://www.google.com/products ), and all shops will eventually have it (you don’t need to do anything to get it).

Etsy has been rolling it out in stages to sellers since December, see the second link for basic info about Etsy’s syndication & to find out if you are syndicated.

What is Google Base/Merchant?
http://www.gotogreatpanes.com/blog/2009/02/15/what-is-google-base

FAQs for Etsy’s Google Merchant Feed/Syndication
–includes vacation mode info!
http://www.gotogreatpanes.com/blog/2009/12/06/faqs-about-the-etsy-gm-feed

When you bring your shop out of vacation mode your currently listed items won’t be placed back in the feed automatically. You’ll need to re-enable your current stock for upload to get them back on Google’s Shopping Search, see here for OhFaro’s quick tip to enable your items.

All items you list, renew, relist or edit will still be added automatically once you are out of vacation mode, this is just about items you had listed when you put your shop in vacation mode.

There does seem to be another small downside to going in to vacation mode besides your items being pulled from Google Shopping & the hassle of re-enabling:

When the new feed from Etsy was coexisting with the RSS feeds sellers had done themselves, items in the older feeds (RSS done by sellers) were coming up close to the top of the search results and the newer feed (Etsy’s syndication) were coming up later in the results for the very same listings. This leads me to believe that older feeds have a little more weight for better search results.

When you go in to vacation mode and come back out, you delete your old sub-account syndication feed and get a new one which might result in less-good results in Google Shopping searches.

That also means if you’ve bookmarked search results for your old author id, you’ll need to update it with your feed’s new author id when you come out of vacation mode or it won’t show you the items you currently have in Google Shopping.

Then your pictures are most likely too big.

If you are selling on Etsy, they have made these recommendations:

Minimum: 430 pixels wide
Maximum: 800 to 1,000 pixels wide or long on the largest side

Narrower images will be pixelated/blurry in the item listing because Etsy will stretch them to fit the 430 pixel-wide space on the listing page.

Larger images are slow to load which is:

and now, it’s also

What to do?

You can either lower the setting on your camera or use photo editing program to make them smaller. If you don’t have photo editing software, you try these two free ones:

Picasa (from what I hear it’s relatively simple)
http://picasa.google.com

GIMP (more advanced)
http://www.gimp.org/windows

Need help getting the image sizes right for cropping on Etsy?

See this post:

Image Cropping for Etsy
http://www.gotogreatpanes.com/blog/2010/04/08/image-cropping-for-etsy

b. Select “http://” from the drop down menu and put in your shop address, for example goto.etsy.com or gotosupplies.etsy.com