What I don't like about eBid...

[lejoueurdepipeau]

And here's No. 80!

A while ago we were told that uploads to Google Shopping France would start "soon" and some time later when I enquired when this was to begin I was told they had already started (maybe I missed a vital announcement?) Perhaps this current thread reveals why my listings are "under review" by Google Shopping France! Even those with a title that means the same in French and English are not appearing - but then the description of the item is in English first followed by the equivalent in French. Maybe they are being rejected because the English listing uses the 250 characters???? Who knows?? However, I need to know....

I have asked numerous times in emails to support what my listings need in order to appear on Google shopping France and the latest news is that ALL my listings are "Under Review" and support say they are investigating ( same as they said a fortnight ago). I am trying to be patient. I have also repeatedly asked what I can do about the lack of available title space/characters to list in both French and English and the possibility of using a subtitle for bi-lingual listings but the issue has been studiously ignored in the responses - as it has on the forums where there has been no response to Gothicina's request re additional characters!

I am on the verge of giving up. The excitement about Google shopping being available to France has waned! I realise that at the moment I am probably the only one who cares and my fate holds little interest for forum members in the UK, USA, OZ, NZ etc but we are NEVER going to attract international sellers to eBid if they cannot be provided with correct and basic information relevant to their sales and listings. I can't understand what is going on - and I speak English as my first language! Dutch, French, Spanish, German, Italian etc speakers are not going to make a huge effort to understand in order to join eBid - and why should they?

[gazlannathai]

... you were absolutely right.

Carried out a check this week submitting a listing that's a duplicate of one already there, but with an iframe that pulled in another page, placed significantly down the description box. eBid has confirmed that this was refused by Google, the only one of my listings to be so disdained. Thanks for the heads-up on that!

Thanks Kimbo - good to know I was talking out of the correct end of my Torso

[gazlannathai]

@ Piper - multi-lingualising is a bit of an arcane art - I know, I've built sites for clients where they are not just multi-lingual (as in Anglo-French) but also multi-alphabet, as in Anglo-Thai. There are huge number of issues that can arrise, not the least of which relates to database language collations and the site-script language collation.

I suspect, eBid is written 100% in English with a UTF-8 language collation of utf8_general_ci for the script and database - this is fine for most general usages, except that the alphabet sort order is different from utf8_french_ci or utf8_german_ci etc. which then mucks up search results sometimes, and can cause character misrepresentation once you get above ascii character number 255 (e.g. for letters with strange accents on them).

Once you then also introduce a third party into the multi-lingual mix (e.g. Google France) then you also have to account for how they character collate their servers and the testing to avoid text corruption takes forever, because so many variables have to be tested. Added to that, is that most multi-lingual scripting gives each "item" (or page or image or whatever) it's own unique reference point in each language, and you're on a nasty programmatic slope (been there, did that, got the collision damage and T-shirt).

However, there is an alternative coding practice that simply extends the database fields per "item" so it can have multiple answers to the same query (e.g. Title-English and Title-French) but that then requires the use of geo-targetting technology, which I assume the boys have at least partially implemented already, which looks at the site visitor's IP address, identifies their country, and returns the Title-(language) for that country. It's not an exact science. ISPs are forever changing their IP-address number ranges, and the IP to country database needs updated near-as-damm-it daily (= server load that slows them down) plus it does not account for the user's default language (e.g. I'm in Thailand but use English, not Thai). Therefore IP geo-location has to be married to Browser language settings (which do show the user's preferred human language). And so the complexity builds.

Multi-lingualising is never a fast job - the last site I did was very simple ( a dozen pages, plus a blog facility ) and that took me three months of programming and testing just on the multi-lingualising. Doing the same for eBid (without Google in the mix) could take a year or more, even with a team of experts on the case (I'm not an expert - - - I'm an expat - LOL) and once Google is then thrown into it, it adds more complication.

Plus, how do eBid feed a multi-lingual listing to Google? Each item submitted must have a unique item number. If a listing is submitted in two languages, the unique item number will be the same within eBid's system and Google will reject one or both of them. If eBid gives them separate numbers for Google's sake, that then means you have two listings for the same item within eBid, and could oversell it and be unable to supply one customer. It could also mean paying a "second category" fee on the second language.

It's a tricky one for da boyz, I'd love to be able to help them out, but it could only be at a project management level, not a programming one, and I'm not sure they'd want that. Also, multi-lingualising a large site with "external" resources requires a large-ish project team, which the site maybe cannot fund. As long as they're doing it in-house, you'll just have to be patient and appreciate that they have a very steep learning curve and long implementation to go through.

However, regarding title length - that might be constrained by Google's acceptable maximum for title length. Once I get a few minutes to investigate, I'll check into that and compare against my ecommerce sites to see if I'm getting any truncated titles on Google from any of them. It might be as simple as that.

Gaz

[lejoueurdepipeau]

I am being patient - honest!! It's just that when you don't hear anything and then something crops up within the forums that might provide a clue to the problems it is hard not to comment and ask if this might explain a few things!

The multi-alphabet thing struck when the first eBid translation into French happened - every letter which would normally come with an accent in French (and other languages) was replaced by a question mark! Looked awful.