How to use Google Merchant Center?

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1. Basic Feed
These are the features you're probably most familiar with, as they're necessary to get started. First, after verifying your website, you need to submit your Google Shopping feed (a list of all your product details), and there are three ways to do this. The best one for you depends on your eCommerce platform, your technical expertise, and your penchant for manual work:

Option 1: Plugin / App

If you are using an ecommerce platform like Shopify or WooCommerce, journalist email database you will have many options to choose from. Among the most popular ones we can find the following:

Shopify App for Google Shopping
WooCommerce Product Fee Pro
Some of these tools will use the Google Merchant Center API, meaning your product data will automatically be transferred to the right place; however, if your app doesn't connect to Google Merchant Center, you'll likely get a feed URL that you'll need to manually upload.

Option 2: Upload your own Feed

If you need to upload your own feed to Google Merchant Center, you will need to be very careful to verify that all values ​​are submitted in the correct format.

Tip: If you're using manual upload or Google Sheets, I recommend starting with a test feed. If you use the standard feed and delay fixing errors that appear, you risk having your account suspended by Google Merchant Center. That's why a test data feed will give you the chance to discover errors and fix them before everything goes "live."

Option 3: Google Spreadsheet

This option is the “most manual” of all, and is done through a template offered by Google Merchant Center , which comes with instructions on how to fill it out.

Feed Template Google Merchant Center
Since you'll need to update this file every time a product or product feature changes, we recommend this last option only for ecommerce stores that handle few products or make infrequent changes. You have to remember that it's important to keep your feed always up to date, so doing one of the first two options is essential.

2. Shipping Settings
In addition to uploading your product feed, you also need to provide Google Merchant Center with your online store's shipping and tax details. You can do this at the product level or storewide. The latter is best, as you'll only need to make a change when the case warrants it, such as a free shipping promotion or new free shipping minimum quantities. You just need to make sure you keep this up to date, because the shipping cost or free shipping notification may appear on every listing, so if you have outdated information, you could be at a disadvantage.

This is very important because it gives the ad greater visibility, as well as a greater reason to buy when comparing prices, as we can see in this Google Shopping result for the search “ buy XYZ mobile ”

Win customers!
Google Shopping Result
Price comparison page for a product on Google Shopping
The prices are quite different, but the impact of that “free shipping” influences where someone clicks. Finally, if you want to verify that this option works correctly, you just have to select the tools button and the shipping and returns option.


Google Merchant Center Shipping and Returns Settings Page
3. Google Merchant Center Diagnostics
Once the feed is uploaded, there is a high chance that you will discover many errors such as missing product numbers, missing categories, or incorrect data formats. To handle these issues, Google Merchant Center has a section called Diagnostics that will tell you exactly what and where all the issues are happening.

Google Merchant Center Diagnostics
Google Merchant Center Diagnostic Page
There are two types of observations that are important in the diagnosis, which are “items about to expire” and “rejected items”, which are indicated in orange and red in the table above; and although errors are essential to appear, warnings are where you can make the difference and maximize the potential of the products in the feed. Within these problems, we highlight three:

Account issues

Account issues affect your entire Google Merchant Center account. These are the most fundamental issues, such as the link between Google Ads and Google Merchant Center, URL verification issues, or policy violations, and they need to be resolved as soon as possible.

Feed problems

If there are any issues with uploading, fetching, or validating your product feeds, you will see errors and warnings pop up in the feeds section. The most common issues are the file format or an expired feed.

Product issues

If all of the above issues are fixed, there are still issues specific to your products. These are usually missing or incorrect attributes, or policy violations (such as a different product price in your feed compared to in your store) or incorrect in/out of stock handling. If you forget a specific attribute for all of the products in your feed, you'll see a lot of errors pop up.

4. Google Merchant Center Offers
Merchant Promotions allow you to display deals directly on Google Shopping ads. These are sort of like an ad extension for Google Shopping. You need to provide the details, but they aren't guaranteed to come through. If the promotion comes through, here's what's shown:

Google Shopping Offers
For this to be displayed, an optional attribute must be added to the feed that is sent to Google Merchant Center, which is called [offer_price]. Also, it must be considered that the offer price must be lower than the base price and that the discount must be between 5% and 90%.

In summary, while Google Merchant Center offers many more options to optimize a feed that will help improve Google Shopping campaigns, we suggest starting with these recommendations to scale the sales volume you need to achieve sales.