Buying on Google Base

Friday, February 24, 2006 at 12:04 PM

By Chetan Patel, Engineering Manager & Stephen Stukenborg, Product Manager

While Google Base provides data structure and distribution for a wide range of content and information, a subset of items are for sale. To help users more easily purchase and sell Google Base items, we're planning to enable people to buy items on Google Base using their Google Accounts.

Many of you are probably already familiar with the Google Account. You use it to sign in and pay for a number of Google services, like Google Video and Google Earth. We're now introducing similar functionality on Google Base.

For buyers, this feature will provide a convenient and secure way to purchase Google Base items by credit card. For sellers, this feature integrates transaction processing with Google Base item management.

We're starting with a very small number of sellers and we expect to include more over the next several months. If you're a seller and you're interested in getting an announcement when this feature is generally available, let us know. And if you want to know how this functionality relates to Google's broader work in payments, read this update. We hope this feature will make it even easier for people to use Google Base to post and distribute a wide range of content, whether information for sharing or goods for sale.

Referencing your site in single-item postings

Friday, February 10, 2006 at 4:32 PM

by Steven De La O, Google Base Operations

You may have noticed the recent removal of the URL field that appeared near the bottom of the single-item posting form. We used the URL from this field to point search results for your items to pages on your website. Now you can achieve the same results using a custom attribute.

Custom attributes can be added at the bottom of the "Details" section of the single-item posting form. Here are a few things to keep in mind before you create one. There are no restrictions placed on the name you select for your attribute, but we do suggest that it be descriptive of the URL value it contains. The data type below the custom attribute name field should be changed from "Text" to "Web URL," and the URL you insert should be valid and begin with either http:// or https://.

We feel that removing the URL field and having you create custom attributes ultimately gives you more control over the data you submit to Google Base. It also increases the visibility of your web site URL by including it in the attribute section of single-item pages.

For those of you who bulk upload your items to Google Base, no changes have been made and users will continue to be directed to the URLs that you specify in your bulk upload files.