Earlier today Thefind.com has introduced an enhanced feed spec and a new product feed tool that allows store owners to submit a free product feed directly to theFind via the Merchant Center. Even if your products are already on their site, you should submit a feed to them according to their new spec. Uploading a direct product feed to TheFind provides you with a finer degree of control over how your products are presented, including the ability to update pricing more frequently and accurately specify information important for consumers such as tax and shipping charges. Having a fresher data feed with more attributes will also help your products rank higher on theFind's site as their algorithm explicitly takes those factors into account when deciding which products to show.
At the time (Thursday, 25 March 2010) of writing the following lines, I started receiving hits from people looking for a way how to ftp to thefind. Note that at this time, thefind.com has temporary disabled the access to thefind.com Merchant Center. Merchants are not able to login in order to manage their account. I you have already created your FTP account with them.
You can use the following function to FTP your feed.
$source_file = "feeds/ayasoftware.txt"; //"CHANGEME-full-path-to-file-with-777-dir-and-file-permissions-your-outfile.txt"; $destination_file = "ayasoftware.txt"; $ftp_server = "ftp.thefind.com" ; $ftp_user_name = "ftp_user_name"; $ftp_user_pass = "ftp_user_pass"; $ftp_directory = ""; // leave blank //Start FTP function ftp_file( $ftpservername, $ftpusername, $ftppassword, $ftpsourcefile, $ftpdirectory, $ftpdestinationfile ) { // set up basic connection $conn_id = ftp_connect($ftpservername); if ( $conn_id == false ) { echo "FTP open connection failed to $ftpservername
\n" ; return false; } // login with username and password $login_result = ftp_login($conn_id, $ftpusername, $ftppassword); // check connection if ((!$conn_id) || (!$login_result)) { echo "FTP connection has failed!
\n"; echo "Attempted to connect to " . $ftpservername . " for user " . $ftpusername . "
\n"; return false; } else { echo "Connected to " . $ftpservername . ", for user " . $ftpusername . "
\n"; } if ( strlen( $ftpdirectory ) > 0 ) { if (ftp_chdir($conn_id, $ftpdirectory )) { echo "Current directory is now: " . ftp_pwd($conn_id) . "
\n"; } else { echo "Couldn't change directory on $ftpservername
\n"; return false; } } ftp_pasv ( $conn_id, true ) ; // upload the file $upload = ftp_put( $conn_id, $ftpdestinationfile, $ftpsourcefile, FTP_ASCII ); // check upload status if (!$upload) { echo "$ftpservername: FTP upload has failed!
\n"; return false; } else { echo "Uploaded " . $ftpsourcefile . " to " . $ftpservername . " as " . $ftpdestinationfile . "
\n"; } // close the FTP stream ftp_close($conn_id); return true; } ftp_file( $ftp_server, $ftp_user_name, $ftp_user_pass, $source_file, $ftp_directory, $destination_file); //End FTP
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