Google Product Search Feed Submissions

[lbohen]

On September 22, 2011, Google is requiring that product feeds to their shopping search engine categorize and provide the following information:

Availability: either 1) in stock – ships in 3 days or less; 2) available for order – ships in 4 or more days; 3) out of stock – not accepting orders for this product & 4) preorder

Tax

Shipping cost

More on this at http://www.lexiconn.com/blog/2011/07/more-changes-to-google-product-search-feed-submissions/.

Google's shopping search engine is an important source of free traffic for us.

We don't keep inventory on 100% of the 10,000+ audio book titles we offer. We direct ship much of our audio books from distributors and to some degree from publishers BUT we don't have a real time link to these suppliers' inventory. We don't even know when a title goes out of publication and often find out when we go to order it.

I expect there are ShopSite stores that have similar situations and would like to know what creative solutions you have implemented or plan to implement. For example if you don't have an item in stock but your source does and the item can be direct shipped, will you categorize the item as "in stock - ships in 3 days or less"?