Instant Cafe Feeder and Google Base

Last Updated on December 3, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla

We have a couple of Cafepress stores. One of the ways to drive traffic to the stores is to use Google Base. Google Base allows you to submit a feed of your items that will then show up in the Google Shopping search.

The problem is building the feed. One store has about 60 items and the other has about 20 or so. You could build the feed by hand but that would take a good bit of effort. There is an application that is currently donateware called the Instant Cafe Feeder. You can find it at http://feeder.instant-cafe.com/ It’s a nice little app that will generate a feed for you. It can be a little tricky to set up but once you figure it out, it’s great. There is also some limited support for it to be found in the cafepress forums.

We used it for a couple of months and everything was great. About 2 months ago, we started getting failures when trying to upload to google. I didn’t have time to sort it out until recently.

When I looked at the errors it was telling me (1) that the expiration date was too far in advance and (2) my URL wasn’t registered properly in the settings.

When I looked at the text file, I could see that the expiration dates were about 45 days out, which is too far for Google Base. That was easily fixed with a simple search and repalce.

As far as the URL, I simply went into the settings for Google Base and added http://www.cafepress.com/mystore (where mystore is the name of my store)

That worked well. The feed succeeded. I’m not sure why the instant cafe dates are wrong but it’s easy enough to fix now that I know the situation.