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google_product_category, tax, and shipping requirements

Mar 2, 2012

Google has made some changes to the google_product_category, tax, and shipping attributes. You may not have to take any action, but we ask you to review the changes to make sure your feeds are up-to-date.

1. tax and shipping

Tax and shipping must be defined (for US sellers). You need to do this even if you do not charge tax and/or shipping. If you have not already, you can easily set up account-level tax and shipping rules.

Note that tax and shipping do not have to be exact. Google only requires that they be estimated, "such that the total cost in Product Search results is either correct or overestimated for the majority of users."

For more information, see Tax and Shipping settings for Google Product Search.

2. google_product_category

Google now requires that you use only the categories from their official taxonomy in the google_product_category attribute. You can no longer specify multiple categories, but you can still specify top-level categories.

You may leave this field blank, unless your products fall into one of the following seven categories:

  • Apparel & Accessories > Clothing
  • Apparel & Accessories > Shoes
  • Apparel & Accessories (Note that submitting this value for clothing and shoes is
  • not acceptable)
  • Media > Books
  • Media > DVDs & Videos
  • Media > Music
  • Software > Video Game Software

Note that once you specify 'Apparel & Accessories', the gender, age_group, size, and color attributes become required. For 'Media', ISBN numbers may be required.

At a minimum, we recommend adding a top-level, default value for this attribute. However, according to Google, "you can increase the chances that your products will be included in relevant categories by sending us highly structured information for your items."

Google has recently revised many of their categories by adding, removing, and changing them. Check your Google Merchant Account Dashboard, or go to Manage Feed > Google Validation Report to see if your items were affected.

For more information, see here:

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