Data Tip: Creating custom item types
April 10th, 2006 | Published in Google Merchant
By Steven De La O, Google Base Operations
Custom item types help increase the variety of items found in Google Base and give us a better understanding of the type of data you want to submit. Some examples of custom item types created recently are Podcasts, Protein databases, Tickets, and Blogs. As custom item types become more widely accepted and used by different providers, we're specifying a set of attributes to create new standard item types. Soon, we hope to release 40 new item types based on how people have used custom item types so far.
We strongly encourage you to create new item types when your items don't match our defined types. It's important to note, however, that you shouldn't create custom item types to be more specific than those we've defined. For example, don't use "Apartments for rent" in place of our "Housing" item type. We defined our standard item types with attributes that should cover all the information you want to provide. If these attributes are not sufficient, we'd prefer that you create custom attributes instead of new item types.
Here's a list of standard item types available now:
| Course schedules Events Housing Jobs New and articles |
People profiles Products Reference articles Reviews Services |
Travel packages Vehicles Wanted ads |