Google Shopping
You can export your products to Google and use it as an additional sales channel. Your products will appear when someone searches for your products on google.com and google.com/shopping. Google will show the picture of your item, its price, and your store name to the customers. Customers who click on your ad will be directed to your site where they can buy your item.
To configure Google shopping:
- In the left panel click ecommerce, and then click Manage Store.
- Click All Sales Channels, and then click Google Shopping.
- Click Enable.
- Select where you want to sell your products, and click Continue to Categories.
- Select a category which will be used for the products storage on the Google site. Click Continue.
Note
Choose the category that will suit for all of your products and will describe your store products the most precisely.
For example, if you sell different kinds of toys (games, puzzles, dolls, etc.) you'd better choose "Toys & Games" category as it suits for all items, but if you sell just "Flying helicopters", you'd better to choose more specific "Toys & Games > Toys > Flying toys" category
6. Set up required identifiers for your products (Brand, GTIN and/or MPN).In order to understand which exact products do you have in your store, Google requires setting up the specific identifiers.
There are three types of such identifiers:
- Brand.The brand or manufacturer name of product
- GTIN. This is a unique product identifier such as UPC (in North America), EAN (in Europe), and ISBN (for books). This is the numerical version of the bar code. Google use GTINs to identify each product and display product specification. The products with incorrect GTIN won’t be listed in Google Shopping.
- MPN. It is a series of numbers and/or letters that have been given to a part by the manufacturer. Each part the manufacturer makes has a different MPN. This allows businesses to identify which company made the part.
You can find the detailed description of these identifiers here: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/160161
Google requires the merchants to set at least two of these identifiers for their products to make them be approved and listed in Google Shopping. If you don’t have one of these identifiers, please check this section to find some workarounds.
All of these identifiers can be added to your products as attributes. The UPC and Brand attributes are predefined for your convenience. An MPN attribute can be set up manually.
- To add these identifiers as attributes:
- Go to the Store Control Panel, click Catalog, and then click Products .
- Click Edit Product next to product you want to configure, and click Attributes.
- You will see two default attributes here: Brand and UPC (equal to GTIN). Set them up here.
- Click Manage attributes and add MPN to the list of available attributes.
- Go back to Catalog- Products and set up the MPNs for your products.
7. Once the tool is enabled you can start your campaign. You'll need an AdWords account to manage your product ads and a Merchant Center account to manage your product listings. You can login to both tools using your current Google account, if you have any, and manage all campaign from one place. If you don't have Google account yet, it is time to create it!
8. Login to Merchant Center account and choose Data Feeds item from the menu on the left side
9. Click +Data Feed.
10. Choose Target country and Format from the corresponding list. Choose the name for your data feed file and place it in Data feed filename field. Save changes.
Note
Data feed filename should NOT contain the feed URL generated in the StoreFront. It can have any name you want to. I want to use Google Spreadsheet to store, edit and upload my feed. option should NOT be ticked.
11. Find new feed and click Create schedule link. In appeared popup window you will need to set the frequency of feed uploading and the Feed URL (you can find the URL of your feed in the control panel-Promotion- Google Shopping)
12. Click Schedule button to schedule feed uploading or Schedule and fetch now to start feed uploading immediately.
13. Wait while products will be fetched. It takes some time and usually depends on the number of items in your store.
14. Set up your Google Shopping campaign: http://www.google.com/merchants/adwordssettings.
Troubleshooting
Missing shipping information or Missing tax information
Please, make sure that you have set Shipping and Taxes on Google Merchant Center side on http://www.google.com/merchants/taxshippingsettings page. In spite of the fact that purchase will be made on your store's side, you should add the same setting on the Google Merchant Center side too.
Missing required attribute: gender, color or age group
Most probably, you are trying to upload your items in "Apparel", "Shoes" or other similar categories in Google. The thing is that some Google categories require the existence of additional attributes in the feed for successfully uploading. More details in the Google documentation: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/1347943?hl=en.
The StoreFront supports this so, to avoid that Missing required attribute error, you will need to make your products feed to comply with the requirements. To do it, you should use one of the Apparel categories and fill the corresponding attributes for your products. How to do it:
- Create a product type with Apparel & Accessories taxonomy assigned:
- In your control panel, click Catalog, and then click Categories. Click +Add Root Category and choose the type that you think better fits your products under the 'Apparel & Accessories' group, e.g. 'Clothing'. The newly created category will appear with a set of pre-defined attributes (UPC*, brand, age, color, gender, size)
2. Assign a product to the created type and set attributes for it:
- On the product details page, open the Attribute tab. Assign the new type to the product and set the attributes
The product will be treated as an item that requires a special set of attributes and those attributes will get to the feed along with the other product data. Please do the above for each product you need to make apparel. After that, the new generated Google shopping feed will contain the updated product with mentioned attributes. Keep in mind that the StoreFront generates the updated feed each 12 hours so you will need to wait a bit.
Automatic item updates: Missing schema.org microdata price information
If you see this message, it means that Google tried to find the schema.org markup at your product pages and hasn’t found it. The schema.org microdata price information is a special markup which allows Google to automatically update the prices of the products at your Google Shopping feed when they are changed. Please refer to this article to learn more about it: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6069143#
Basically, there are two ways to keep your store information up to date in your Google Shopping account:
Once you set up an uploading schedule for a data feed, the information in your Google Shopping account will always be relevant and you can simply ignore the “Missing schema.org microdata” notification.
- The schema.org microdata for products. This markup will appear on your product pages as soon as Google AJAX indexing is enabled for your store. If you use plugins for Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal, it’s enabled by default and you shouldn’t do anything to make it work. If your site is built with help of another platform, you can implement Google AJAX Indexing yourself. As soon as you do it, the schema.org markup will be automatically added to your store.
- Scheduled feed update. Google Shopping allows you to schedule the feed update for your account. The feed that is generated by the StoreFront is updated every 12 hours, so your inventory and prices will always stay relevant.
- Basically, you don't need to worry about these settings to make your Google Shopping feed to be relevant anytime. The XML feed is updated every 12 hours. So you should set up the automatic upload option in Google Merchant Center. This option allows you to link the feed URL, which is available in your Control Panel à Promotions à Marketplaces à Google Shopping page with your Google Merchant account.
Once you set up an uploading schedule for a data feed, the information in your Google Shopping account will always be relevant.
Feed is rejected as the checkout page is not secure
Google requires that the checkout pages of the store must be using a secure connection - they should be SSL protected, with valid SSL certificate - via HTTPS. Please check the complete list of requirements that you need to meet for your site to be approved for Google Shopping here: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188486?hl=en
Please note that the checkout on the StoreFront side is totally secure and conducted over a secure connection (HTTPS). However, according to Google requirements, the links to the pages of your site must start with https://
So, to be able to upload your products to Google Shopping you need to purchase and install SSL certificate on your site.
FAQs
How to verify ownership of my site in Google Merchant center?
If you use StoreFront on your own website,
Please use any of the available verification options listed here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35179?hl=en
What if I don’t have Brand for my products?
If you sell custom-made goods which have no specific brand name, you can set any brand name you like for your products (for ex. “MyGreatBrand” will be enough).
What if I don’t have GTIN for my products?
There is no workaround and adding the right GTIN for each product is the only option. But if you are able to provide Brand and MPN, it would be enough. Please, don’t try to set up random or incorrect GTINs for your products. It may cause your account to be suspended by Google.
What if I don’t have MPN for my products?
The MPN field allows you to use any combinations of letters and digits. So, if you don’t have MPNs for your products, you can easily work it around by adding your product SKU to this field.
How to set up default category attribute for the product
The category attribute is used to indicate the category of the product in the Google Shopping feed.
The value of this attribute is added to the feed based on the categories the product belongs to.
When the product belongs to several categories, all of these categories are included in the feed.
If the product belongs to several categories, you may want to specify default category that will be passed to Google as the primary product type.
For example, if you sell knitted teddy bears, they may be added in two categories at the same time: “Knitted Toys” and “New”.
In this case, you may want to specify “Knitted Toys” as a primary category as it is informative, while “New” category is useful only for your site store, but not for Google Shopping.
In order to specify which of the category should be passed as the primary product type, please follow these steps:
- Go to the Store Control Panel- Catalog- Products.
- Choose the product you want to edit.
- Scroll page down and choose which of the categories should be the default.
Further steps
There is the collection of video guides, which can help you to export and sell your products on Google Shopping. Please, check this link: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA1BDD5AB4329808A.
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