Marty Zigman on "How To: SuiteCommerce Advanced Google Product Feed"

How To: SuiteCommerce Advanced Google Product Feed

By Marty Zigman, on April 24, 2015

This article is relevant if you are seeking to produce a Google Product Feed and you are using NetSuite’s latest SuiteCommerce Advanced eCommerce platform.

Background

NetSuite’s latest eCommerce offering, SuiteCommerce Advanced, is a powerful upgrade from the standard NetSuite Site Builder offering. The platform offers a responsive, mobile friendly, AJAX driven consumer experience. The power of this platform is that it leverages all the capacities of the NetSuite platform while also adding more features such as a SOLR / Lucene driven search engine, Suite Script Server Pages (SSP) and a new Commerce API.

In order to produce flexible capacities with product image management, especially when using Matrix Inventory types, NetSuite extended the concept of Associated Images which allowed for an unlimited list of images associated with a product — this helps drive the web site consumer purchasing experience as they can see all types of views of the prospective product. This Associated Images is a special structure that is not a traditional child table (sublist) of an item. Instead, you name your images under a special file naming convention based on the Item’s internalid and then place them into a specific folder in NetSuite’s Document repository. NetSuite then natively knows how to bring forth these images and link them to the item definition. See images for an illustration.

With that background, we now enter the discussion about product feeds. A standard Google Product feed effectively needs to provide the product, the price, an image reference, and a URL to get to the product if clicked by a customer shopping on a remote shopping portal. NetSuite’s native product feed is challenged because it can’t get to any of these image structures. Further, NetSuite’s saved search technology does not provide a reference to these “Associated Images”. Finally to make matters even more complex, when working with Matrix items, child items inherit the parent item images to make data management handy and powerful — yet the data is even more distant from the item in question.

How to Solve the Product Feed Generation Challenge

When working with our clients on their SuiteCommerce Advanced eCommerce system, we developed an innovation which I believes open up a new pathway for NetSuite data retrieval. While a conventional approach would have been to create custom tables to represent the data that was stored in the file cabinet, it would have been a challenge to maintain all the information about the files in the document repository. Instead, given we have worked worked with SOLR / Lucene search engines outside of NetSuite building eCommerce web applications, we realized that we could get the data we need by going directly to the search engine; we could see that the images were indeed being displayed to consumers on the website and thus we could get to what otherwise seemed to be locked up data.

The key to this solution then was to produce the following:

Generate a custom item field to represent a token to tag items (products) that need to be in the product feed.
Create a new search engine “fieldset” that will contain all the feed data elements needed.
Create a script that will query the search engine based on the field set with the right query token. This will then return the values and products needed to supply to the shopping portal.
Script the search output into a CSV file that can easily be uploaded into Google.

For example, the following URL (the real url has been obscured to protect client’s identity) will output a JSON formatted string that contains all the data needed to generate the CSV file:


http://abc.sandbox.netsuitestaging.com/api/items?fieldset=feedgoogle&q=GGGLLL&limit=100

In our case, we built a custom Python script that can run on a Windows machine that will output a CSV file ready to go for Google. The client did not need to make any changes except to simply tag the items that were desired to be in the feed. With this basic architecture, we could build more product feeds as needed to supply all the shopping portals.

Get Help with your SuiteCommerce Advanced Web Site

They key to getting the most out of NetSuite is to remember that is a platform for which you can invent solutions which may seem difficult or impossible. With the right leadership, the new SuiteCommerce Advance (SCA) architecture is especially powerful when you combine elements and structures with some clever thinking and expert skills. If you would like help getting more out of your NetSuite eCommerce platform, let’s have a conversation.

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Marty Zigman

Holding all three official certifications, Marty is regarded as the top NetSuite expert and leads a team of senior professionals at Prolecto Resources, Inc. He is a former Deloitte & Touche CPA and has held CTO roles. For over 30 years, Marty has produced leadership in ERP, CRM and eCommerce business systems. Contact Marty to set up a conversation.