Store contribution
In our effort to display reliable priceinformation about your products we need your help. So far, and for natural reasons, we have yet to find two stores showing their product information in the same way. Currently we are parsing all individual product pages to find information. This is timeconsuming and imposes unnessesary effort on your webservers, not to mention all the errors that might sneak in.
Some of you allow download of all your products in a single excel file, which drastically decreases our use of your bandwidth. However, even these lists differ, so that we have to check each list in a different way. This, as mentioned above, increases risk of errors, and that's not good for anyone. Neither us, nor you or your customers.
What we propose is a way for all to supply information in the same way, reducing effort and demand for bandwith, at the same time increasing accuracy.
What we currently search your webpages (or lists) for is the following information:
- Product name (mandatory)
- Product type
- Alcohol content (ABV)
- Container volume (mandatory)
- Container type
- Price (mandatory)
- Date of price
- Currency (mandatory)
- Age
- Vintage
- In stock
- Your specific product URL
- Bottler
If either mandatory field is missing, your product will NOT be entered into our database.
We've put together a few examples of what we would like a web page showing all your products to look like:
| Name | Type | ABV | Volume | Container | Price | Currency | Date | Age | Vintage | In stock | URL | Bottler |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ardbeg | Whisky | 40 | 1x70cl | Bottle | 30.00 | EUR | 2007-09-22 | 10 | Yes | Cadenhead | ||
| Magners | Cider | 5.6 | 24x33cl | Can | 8.00 | GBP | 2007-09-22 | No | ||||
| Beaujolais Royal | Red wine | 13 | 6x75cl | Bottle | 60.00 | USD | 2007-09-22 | 2005 | 23 | |||
| Carlsberg Hof | Beer | 5 | 900x33cl | Bottle | 800.00 | EUR | 2007-09-22 | Yes | ||||
| Whisky Bible 2008 | Book | 150.00 | SEK | 2007-09-22 | 2008 | No |
A template of the table above can be downloaded here. Just right click the link and save. The current template version is '1.1'. Older versions of the template are no longer available for download.
For those of you currently using template 1.0, the only difference is that we have added the non mandatory field 'Bottler'. If your store is not using this information, there is no need to upgrade to version 1.1, but of course we wouldn't mind if you did.
Important!
- All fields MUST be in the specified order.
- The 'title'-property of the html-tags MUST be present, including the version number in the <TABLE> tag. The value of the title properties MUST BE lower CASE, thus matching the template EXACTLY.
- Currency must be the textual abbreviation, NOT the currency sign. Use CAPITAL letters.
- The ABV-field MUST NOT include the %-sign.
- The volume-field MUST contain an abbreviated volume scalar (i.e. l,dl,cl,ml,oz). If the scalar is missing, the product WILL NOT be entered into our database.
- In the ABV and pricefields, use a decimal point, NOT a decial comma.
- A thousand-separator in the pricefield MUST NOT be a point. Only a comma is allowed, allthough we would rather see the separator omitted altogether.
- The datafields MUST NOT contain any HTML-formatting.
Of course we don't mean for you to put all this information in manually. That's what computers are for. I estimate that configuring your webserver in such a way would take your webmaster 2 hours at the most, and this is something that has to be done only once.
Please make this list available to us as a hidden (or public if you want...) link on your webpage so that our crawler can find it. And of course, don't forget to tell us where you have put it.
Whiskyfinder also supports the Google Base RSS 2.0 format, with Whiskyfinder specific custom attributes. To see a sample RSS file, click here.
Regards, The Whiskyfinder Team
