Recently, Bonanzle debuted the ability to import your items into Google Base (or Product Search). Their documentation was very user friendly and while Google was never actually able to import our items from Bonanzle, its probably just a temporary issue as it worked great for many people. The instructions to set up your Bonanzle products are here.

While I was setting this up, I realized that the documentation for doing this very same thing with eBay is pretty terrible so I decided to take a moment to write out the process step-by-step for fellow eBay users.

Two things before we start:

  • As far as I know, you have to be an eBay store owner to be able to take advantage of this feature. Only eBay store’s have the published feed of all their items that lets you automatically import. Google Product Search also doesn’t do auctions so it will only include fixed price or store inventory listings and omit any auctions.
  • If you have a Google Products account for your own webstore, Bonanzle booth or other store already set up, you need to create a new account for your eBay listings or visa versa. Just create another Google Products account with a different email address. Unfortunately, the way that the feeds import will conflict with one another so you just need to separate them into different accounts.

Getting started:

  • In your eBay account go to Sellers Manage Store (the link at the bottom of your store).
  • Then, under the Marketing Tools navbar, under the Store Marketing Heading, click Listing Feeds. 
  • Select “Make a file of your Store Inventory listings available” and update. Under this option, there will be a link that will look like http://esssl.ebay.com/GetListings/yourstorename?fmt=g Take note of this, we will need it in a second. If you are activating this link for the very first time, please note that it will take about 12 hours for eBay to get this set-up for you.
  • Create a Google Base Account (or log into one if you already have one and aren’t importing something else into it already).

Now, if you always sell the same items and your inventory is pretty static, you may wish to just download the Google Base Store Connector. This free program imports items from eBay, Yahoo, or osCommerce in a few clicks and allows you to bypass the process we are about to go into. However, keep in mind that Google only keeps items in product search for 30 days so you would need to remember to reupload your items every month with this program.

Now, if your inventory is ever changing and you don’t want to be bothered with using Store Connector every month, read on.

  • Once you are in your Google Base Account, go to Settings (it’s one of the tabs under the Google Base logo).
  • Once there, change your Website URL (Optional) to that link we got from eBay before. It will usually be http://esssl.ebay.com/GetListings/yourstorename?fmt=g but replace yourstorename with the name of your store. (Duh, right?)
  • Once that is done, go back to the My Items tab and select Data Feeds then the New Data Feed button.
  • Select the target country that you wish.
  • Under 2. Select item type, select Products and then googlebase in the menu that comes up under that. 
  • Under 3. Specify the data feed filename, type your store name .xml. For instance, if your store is Priced Nostalgia you type pricednostalgia.xml here. 
  • Click Register Data feed. 
  • Now your feed shows in the list of feeds. Under Schedule, click edit. From here you can select how often you want Google Product Search to look at your eBay Store and update your listings. This can be anywhere from daily to monthly depending on how often you update. 

And you’re done! Now you don’t have to worry about remembering to add items to Google Product Search. Instead, Google Base will automatically import anything you list on eBay into their listings and you can spend more time working on your tan.

Or, you know, working on other stuff.