New website issues

Hello forum,

I have just taken over a website from another company. Its an e-commerce site, it is still hosted by the original developers.

The question is i have had a problem adding My products to Google Base, the sites developers tell me they had it working when the last company paid them for SEO, but google have changed the Base products requirements and they would now need to charge me 120 for development of the site?

Now im not up to speed on this, but im pretty sure its a generic e-commerce package the developers have bought and then added the graphics, layout etc etc. If i am right, correct me here if m not, then surely they do not do the programming and the e-commerce package they bought should sort this.

i told them i am not comfortable paying for something that is such a basic characteristic of an e-commerce site and should be working, amazed its not already.

Sorry for the long winded message, as you can tell i am not an expert.....

images of the working side of the site attached for clarification!

many thanks for any thoughts.

maybe a link to your site so I can see what platform you are using. Do you have access to the back end?

yes i do have access, but not to keen to send out the details.

site is www.enthumo.com.

Kind regards

Al

Quote:

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Originally Posted by roban

maybe a link to your site so I can see what platform you are using. Do you have access to the back end?

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God knows I don't want the details I wanted to know what ecommerce platform you are using.

i thought so.....

i put a couple of images of the admin side for you, but i have no idea who the provider is as its all branded with the developers name.

Cheers

Al

These people are pretty clever so they don't give too much information and there's no support forum. If you have access to the site via FTP (are they hosting this as well?) there is probably a module directory and inside you should be able to find the Google Base files. tell me if you can.

The developers are hosting it, i have no access through FTP that i know of. I found this information, in the photo attached.
When i linked to Google Base, it gave me a .xml file to download, this has im guessing all my product info, although i have no program on my mac that will read it?!

Many thanks again!

Al

It's a very straight forward system. With no FTP support nor any access to the server or your files I can't think of any way for you to take control unless there is a module in your admin section.

You can read the xml file with any text editor or spreadsheet program.

• log in to your CMS download all your products and open in spreadsheet.
• create the proper fields in another speadsheet and recreate with your product data, completing any fields google require that are empty
• save as a tab separated values text file
• upload the new datafeed to Google merchant centre

You now have control of your own datafeeds

just sayin

hippi:)

Get access for database and get rights of control penal of site alongside the admin penal. Only then you can change the structure of any deep thing of site.

You're going to need to get access to everything to be able to make the changes

As others have stated, job #1 would be to get access to the sites FTP and database. Once you determine the software used to create the site, you can see if they have also updated the application for the new Google requirements. You may just need to update the shopping cart application. If not, you'd have to get the software programmed yourself. Most shopping cart applications can be custom programmed.

If you do not have FTP access and database access, there's not much you can do. Some web development companies do not provide FTP access because then you are locked into using them forever. Some developers use CMS's and hosted applications and you can NOT move websites to other hosting providers. They want you married to them. If you wanted to use a different hosting provider, you would have to create a new Ecommerce web site from scratch.

I do not believe in this practice.

It sounds like that's why they are not providing you FTP details. I'm not talking about access to the admin area, I mean ftp, were all files are.

As a last resort... you could edit the Google base file that's sent to Google, but you'd have to update it yourself if the admin area will not update it correctly. The admin area may overwrite all your Google base file work if you make changes in the admin area after too. You'd have to look for that. Good luck.