Hi,

I am hoping someone can help me in regards to generating custom fields for VM2. We have a website which has master products such as Tapered Corks with a value of 0. Each of these master products then has a custom field called Sizes which contain the different sizes and prices of the product.

Here is an example:

Product Name: Tapered Corks
Custom Field Sizes: Please Select
Custom Field Sizes: 12mm - £ 34.00
Custom Field Sizes: 15mm - £ 38.00
Custom Field Sizes: 18mm - £ 52.00
Custom Field Sizes: 20mm - £ 54.00

What I have found so far is that if the master product has a value of zero it is not included in the feed. If I increase the master product value to 1.00 the product displays in the feedd but the size attribute just says Please Select. The product is only displayed once, what I want is for the product to be displayed according to the number of custom fields i.e. once for every custom field value. In a perfect world I would obviously want the feed to ignore Please Select values but I can live with that (I can manually delete them) but I need all of the other values to be added.

Any help would be much appreciated

What you need to do is change the master price back to 0 again. Then enable the 'Show Product Variants' option in the feed options.

Then find the 'Size: Use Custom Field' option, you should see your sizes custom field listed there, select this. This will tell the feed to use that custom field to display size information. The feed should then display each of the size options as what Google calls 'product variants'.

You would be well advised to read what Google say about product variants, the information is on this page: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188494?hl=en&ref;_topic=2473824. You need to check that what you will be doing meets their terms, although it sounds as if you should be OK based on what you have told me.

Hi Blogger,

Thank you for your reply.

I have already tried the setup you suggest but it is only showing one variant in the feed, which is for the first option only. It does not show the other 4 as per my example.

Any ideas??

The setup I explained is the method for doing this.

Do you have a separate SKU for each product variant? Google do require a product identifier for each variant, if there is not one the product will not be included. If you don't want to use SKUs you can change the 'Product Identifier' option to use the product id. It is better to use SKUs though because this is something meaningful usually and is under your control, whereas the id is just generated automatically by the database.

Could you provide the URL of your feed? Then I might be able to see what is going on. Otherwise I am just having to guess what you have or have not done which is time consuming and slightly annoying.

Thank Blogger for your post

It seems I was having a stupid moment...I was only using a standard cart variant to display the product options but now I have created a test product using a VM - Custom, stockable variants the variants are correctly displaying in the feed! - Thank you!!!!

I have noticed however, that it will only add products where the parent product has a value greater than zero - is it possible that this is disabled as I normally set the parent product to zero and all of my variants then are loaded with their price rather than the difference??

Your help is greatly appreciated!

Feed URL (parent product value set to 0.01): www.puretreecork.co.uk/components/com_go...l/googlebase.xml.txt

Are you sure about this? There is nothing in the code that would allow the parent product price to affect whether the product is added. It only depends on whether the price of the item is non-zero.

It could be something odd to do with how virtuemart calculates prices, we will look into that possibility.

Hi Blogger

Did you manage to re-create the issue regarding zero value parent products?? For the minute I have set my parent product to 0.01 and reduced the value of my child products (not ideal but it does display the products in the feed).

The only problem I haven't manage to fix is that despite there being an additional charge for all of my child products they are not included in the Google feed.

You can see the problem on the feed here:
www.puretreecork.co.uk/index.php?option=...exml&format;=xml&id;=1

I have also attached a screenshot of the setup of the child products - am I missing something??

This is not a solution because the price used must be equal to the price displayed on the product details page.

I think that this is just a problem with the way you have set up the prices, you must edit the child products themselves and give them a price, it is that which the field will use. Your problem at the moment is that the child products do not have a price, so are not included in the feed.