Anyone who has ever tried to get their products listed in Froogle will testify to the difficulty of the task. Many have tried and given up half way through the process because it seems an almost impossible task.

In truth, the task isn't all that difficult. The main obstacle is the on-line Froogle documentation. It would seem that there was no one in charge who knew anything about human interfaces or even how to write a plain, unambiguous sentence.

After wading through the process myself, I realized that there was a need for something a little simpler. By following the xx simple steps in this document, you should be able to get your website's products listed in Froogle in no time.

Froogle requires that this text document be a tab-delimited document containing certain product fields. The easiest way to produce this document is by using either Microsoft Word, or Microsoft Excel, although you can use any application that can produce tables and has a table to text conversion feature. For simplicity's sake, we'll use Microsoft Word in our example.

Create a blank Microsoft Word document. In this document, create a table, 7 columns wide. The number of rows in this table should be the number of products you have plus 1 (The first row of the table will be for column names).

In the first row, type the column names. Here is a list of the column names in the required order plus the definition of each column. (note: use lower case)

product_url: The complete url (starting with http) of this products website page.

name: The name of this product.

description: The description of this product. (About xx characters long)

price: The price of this product. You can leave off the $ sign

image_url: The complete url of an image on your website for this product.

category: If your products are divided in to categories on your website.

offer_id: Differentiates the price offer on the Froogle if different..

In each succeeding row, after the first row, enter your product information. Each row is a separate and distinct product.

a.) First save your Word document. You may have to adjust or correct it and you might change prices, or add or delete products in the future.

b.) Next, select the table. (Word's Table>Select>table menu).

c.) Then convert the table to a tab-delimited text file. (Word's Table>Convert>Table to text menu). On this menu screen, choose the tab character as the delimiter.

d.) Once the table has been converted, save the Word document as a plain text document. (Word's File>Save as> save as type: Plain text. Save this file in the same folder you saved the Word doc version of the file.

Unfortunately it seems that the Froogle team requires a separate account. I have an Adsense account and a Sitemaps account but I needed to create yet another Google account for my Froogle setup. It is the same company – isn't it?

Anyway, to get to the Froogle merchant page, go to Google's Home page.

a.) Click Froogle (above the search box)

b.) Click Information for merchants (at the bottom of the page).

c.) Click the Get Started button.

d.) Fill out the registration form and click the “I agree' button at the bottom.

Froogle will email you if you are accepted. If you have filled out the form correctly, you will be. You may have to choose a different email than you've used for your other Google accounts. If necessary, create a new Hotmail account or Google Gmail account to get an email address you haven't used with Google.

These next few steps are agonizingly slow. Each step requires you wait for a response from Froogle which can be a few hours or a few days. Getting this done will require some patience and persistence.

After you have been accepted, return to the merchant log-in page.

a.) Go to Google's Home page and click the Froogle link.

b.) Click the Information for merchants link.

c.) Log in with your email address and password

d.) Click the store link you want to register a feed for. Your stores are listed on the left.

e. ) Next, click the Register for a new product feed link (on the right side of the page near the top.

f.) Fill out the form and click Register New Feed. Make sure the file name matches the tab-delimited file you created in Step 2.

After you have logged in, click the View FTP info link.

Fill out and submit this form to create your new FTP account.

Now wait. It can take several hours before Froogle actually sets up your FTP account.

Step 6: Upload your file to Froogle.

In your browser, go to ftp://hedwig.google.com/. If required, enter your FTP password.

Open the folder that contains the tab-delimited file you created in Ste 2. Drag and drop this file from your folder onto the FTP browser window.

You may get alerts from Froogle that tell you you've done something wrong. If so, you're at the mercy of Froogle's help documentation.

Hope this helps.

Mike Tyler