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!
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?!
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.
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.
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.
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Originally Posted by roban
