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Google Shopping

How long does it take for my products to be listed?

Our service allows you to submit your products immediately. Google will process the submission within twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The steps are listed below:

  • Submission - Our server uploads your data feed file to Google's server (via FTP file transfer)
  • Pick-up - "Data Feeds" tab shows "Processing..." and time of upload.
  • Processing complete - "Data Feeds" tab shows number of items inserted or an error message
  • Items Inactive - Items will listed in the "Inactive Items" tab as "Published... searchable soon"
  • Items Active - Items will be listed in the "Active Items" tab as "Published and searchable"
  • Statistics and Quality - Available in "Data Quality" and "Performance" tabs (always delayed one to two days)
  • Image Thumbnails - thumbnail images will appear as image not available until Google’s server fetches them
How will I benefit from being listed in Google Shopping?

Google Shopping allows people shopping for items to find your items via the Google search engine. It helps you reach buyers when they are actively searching for items to buy. Google Shopping lets your control product listings, allowing you to provide highly relevant and fresh results to shoppers.

Listings in Google Shopping are enabled via Product Listing Ads, which lets you control the pay-per-click bid (as little as $0.01 per click) and daily budget. Along with advanced targeting options, this allows you to optimize your advertising campaign for the best results.

Configuring the 'condition' attribute for Google feeds.

By default, our feed sets all items to have the 'new' 'condition' value. If the 'condition' of your items varies, then follow these instructions.

  1. Add a custom field to your store catalog called 'google-condition' with a default value of 'new'.
  2. Set any items as 'refurbished' or 'used' as needed.
  3. On our site, go to Manage Feed > Define Fields > Edit 'condition'.
  4. Enter google-condition in the Field Name box, and then save the settings.
  5. Run a Refresh task, and then you can review the changes in the product list before running a submission.

Google only accepts 'refurbished', 'used', and 'new' as the condition. Your catalog must only contain these values. For an explanation of what these values mean, refer to the Google Product Feed Specifications.

Configuring Sale Price for Google Shopping

By default, our Google feeds submit the sale-price as the price, and this works for almost all customers since they generally do not use sale-price for specials, but rather for the ordinary, day-to-day pricing. If you are interested in submitting true, advertised sale pricing, please read below.

When using the Google's sale_price attribute, Google has the following requirements:

If you use the sale-price for true, advertised specials, then you can configure your feed to submit the sale-price as described below. Note that this Google attribute is experimental, and it is not yet clear how exactly it is to be used and how it affects your listings in Google. Please use the instructions below only as a guideline.

  1. Go to Manage Feed > Define Fields
  2. Click Edit next to the price field.
  3. Enter regular (without quotes) as the Price Source and click Update.
  4. Click Edit next to the sale_price field.
  5. Enter sale (without quotes) as the Price Source and click Update.
  6. Click Edit next to the sale_price_effective_date field.
  7. Enter the name of a catalog field that contains this information, and click Update.
  8. Resubmit the feed from Tasks > Submit a Task
Why doesn't Google Shopping show all my results?

When you search in Google Shopping by your store name, you may or may not see all your products in the search results.

To do an accurate search, you should search by Account ID rather than store name. Your Account ID can be found in your Google Merchant Account Dashboard on the top-left of the page. (Account ID may also be known as accountid, sellerid, authorid, seller ID, or author ID.) Enter the URL as follows into your browser:

http://www.google.com/products?authorid=1234567

You can also use this form to run an AuthorID search in Google Shopping:

Google Account ID (e.g. 1234567)

It is no longer possible to see the approximate number of matching items or navigate to the last page of results to get a count of the listings (unless there are less than about 100 results).

Note that the search results may vary by your geographical location and may vary over time as Google's search index is distributed and updated over time.

The only correct way to see your searchable items is to log into your Google Merchant Account Dashboard, go to the Products tab, and select the "Status" as "Searchable". Note that the item count here is also an estimate, and you can only see accurate item counts on the "Data Feeds" tab.

How do I set my store name in Google Shopping?

To change the way your store name is displayed in Google Shopping results, you must set it in your Google Merchant Center dashboard on the Business Information page.

For other shopping engines, the store name is also set via the merchant account of the shopping engine.

The Store Name setting in our system on the Manage > Modify Setting page is only for internal use, and does not affect anything in any search engine.

How do I configure free shipping for Google Shopping?

If all your products have free shipping, then you can configure this via your GMA Shipping Settings. Simply create a flat-rate shipping rule, and set the price to zero.

Otherwise, if only certain items have free shipping, then configure your default shipping costs in the Google Merchant Account, and then override the shipping cost for individual items using the instructions below. These instructions also apply to Bing Shopping, which uses the shipping cost format.

  1. Add the following custom/meta field to your store catalog: google-shipping.
  2. Set the value to 'US:::0.00' (without quotes) on the items that qualify for free shipping.
    • Leave all the other items blank, so that the shipping cost for these will still be based on the account-level shipping rates.
    • To set other shipping rates, please see the Google Shopping shipping attribute instructions.
    • The Google shipping attribute is composed of country, region, service, and price. You can specify multiple shipping rules for a single product by separating each by commas.
  3. Click the Refresh button from the Manage Feed page of your Google Shopping feed.
  4. Go to the Manage Feed > Analyze Source Data page to confirm that the custom field has been imported, and note the exact name.
  5. Edit the 'shipping' field on the Define Fields page of your Google Shopping feed, and set the Field Name to 'google-shipping' or the exact name that appeared on the Analyze Source Data page.
  6. Click the Submit button from the Manage Feed page of your Google Shopping feed.

Important Tips

  • For more flexibility, add a 'shipping-label' field to your store catalog instead of the above. You can make up and assign labels to each of your items. For example, you might set up labels like 'freight', 'free', 'ground', etc. Then, in your GMA, you can set up the different rates and assign labels to them. Google will use the shipping_label values assigned to each item to choose the rate for the item.
  • We recommend setting ship-weight to the actual ship weight of the items, as opposed to setting it to zero to trigger free shipping.
  • One other thing you will need to do is log into your Google Merchant center account, and ensure that "Use Quoted Fields" setting is set to "No". Instructions for doing so are here: Google Feed Settings.
How do I get my store reviews or ratings to appear in Google Shopping?

Unfortunately, there is currently no way to control any aspect of your seller reviews or ratings in Google Shopping via data feeds.

Google provides some advice regarding seller ratings in the links below. Basically, the domain registered on the third-party review site must match the domain registered in your Google Merchant Account, and there must be at least 30 reviews. Meeting these requirements is not a guarantee that the reviews will be listed.

Changes are coming soon though. They are now accepting reviews from Bazaarvoice and PowerReviews, if you subscribe to their paid review services. Google also hopes to add additional partners, as well as a self-submission model.

How I can optimize my data feed to create more traffic to my website and boost sales?

Look through our support articles to find numerous optimization strategies. We offer a variety of optimization services, which you can read about here: Services for Data Feeds.

My product listings now appear in Google Shopping, but not all of my images.

Images thumbnails are shown after the products are listed. It can take days for their system to process all your product images into thumbnails.

Is it possible to change my product descriptions before they are sent to Google Shopping?

This is not possible. Our system passes your product descriptions as-is to Google Shopping. The only changes made are to comply with their requirements. For example, the feed automatically strips HTML tags. It truncates the description (on a word boundary) if it is too long. It also substitutes the product title if the description is blank.

Google Shopping requires that the description submitted match the description displayed on your site. Therefore, in order to make changes, you must edit the product descriptions in your store. This is also better because your content has a single source, so you only need to edit it in one place.

What is the difference between Google Base, Merchant Center, and Product Search?

Google Shopping (previously known as Google Product Search) is Google's shopping search engine for end-users.

Google Merchant Center is the site for merchants to upload their product listings.

Google Base is the site for uploading other types of listings to Google, such as real estate and job postings. (Previously, product listings were uploaded here too.)

What should be my data feed settings in Google Merchant Center?

When you create your data feed, select 'Products' as the type, 'googlebase' as the format, and enter a file name ending in '.txt'. The default settings will work with our system, but if you need to verify them, follow these instructions:

  1. Go to GMA Product Feeds
  2. Under the Upload column, make sure that it says Create schedule or Paused schedule
  3. If there is an active schedule, click on it, and then click the Pause Schedule button
  4. Click Settings under the data feed file name
  5. Verify the settings below:
    • Filename: your store name ending in .zip
      Examples:
      www.mystorename.com => mystorename.zip
      www.mystorename.co.uk => mystorename_co_uk.zip
      www.mystorename.com.au => mystorename_com_au.zip
    • Encoding: UTF-8 (Autodetect is not reliable)
    • Delimiter: Tab
    • Use quoted fields: No
    • Default Currency: US Dollar (The 'No default currency' option is not reliable.)
    • Click Save changes
  1. Log into your Aten Software account
  2. Go to My Account > Manage Feed > Advanced Settings.
  3. Set the the "File Enclosure" setting to "None" and click 'Update'

Notes

Disabling quoted fields is the default and recommended setting.

Note that attributes that consist of multiple sub-attributes, such as 'tax' and 'shipping', do not work if enclosed in quotations. Therefore, we recommend to set Use quoted fields to "No".

Setting "Encoding" to "Autodetect" usually works fine, but if you add any special characters to your titles or descriptions, then there is a chance that Google will not detect the encoding and then they would reject those listings. Google's auto-detect logic is not perfect (it may only look at the top 100 lines of the data feed file). Therefore, it is safer to set "Encoding" to "UTF-8".

I have multiple stores, can I set up multiple feeds?

Yes, you can set up any number of stores of any type from within one account on our system.

We recommend maintaining one account to save on fees and to simplify administration. You are welcome to open multiple accounts if, for example, you must keep the billing separate.

For Google Shopping, you can manage all your stores from within one Google Merchant Account. All you have to do is follow the instructions to convert to an advanced account, which will give you a new multi-client account (MCA).

Bing Shopping also allows you to manage multiple stores from within one account. Other shopping channels generally require you to have a separate account for each store. Please check with them to confirm.

How much additional traffic (or clickthroughs, leads, sales) will my store attract if it is listed in Google?

You may or may not receive additional traffic. It depends on many factors including your product mix, pricing, Google's search algorithms, and buyer tastes. This service only manages data submission, and does not guarantee that your products will be accepted by Google, or that you will see a traffic increase. Please see the Terms of Service for details.

Why don't product sections, products with zero price, or items marked non-orderable show up in the product list?

The following types of listings are filtered out automatically by our feed system, and will not appear in the product list.

  • Product listings with zero price or no price
  • Product listings where Orderable is 'No'
  • Section or category pages

Google, and most other shopping engines, require item listings to have a purchasable product on them with a minimum price of $0.01.

Is additional information for books, music, or videos submitted?

Yes, you can add the information as attributes of your data feed.

How are item options submitted?

Product options are automatically recognized and submitted. They are added as a custom attribute for Google Base feeds in a readable format, e.g. "Smily Face T-Shirt - Options: Size: S, M, L - Color: White, Black". More keywords in the description help your search result rankings for longer, multi-term queries. Longer queries tend to have higher conversion rates.

Will my images be submitted to Google and other shopping engines?

Yes, our system reads the image URLs from your product data catalog. Our software correctly determines the image links, and submits them in the data feed.

Some of our feeds can also be configured to submit additional image URLs besides the main image of the product. Doing so may improve your ranking in the shopping engines.

How does this service categorize my products?

By default, our feeds leave the product categories exactly as they are defined in your store.

For shopping engines that have their own, official category list or taxonomy, you can define a default category that applies to all your items via your settings.

We also offer categorization services for data feeds, where we can categorize your items on an ongoing basis.

Google Feed Preliminaries Setup Checklist

In order for us to set up and optimize your Google Shopping feed, you will need to complete the following steps:

Google Required Attributes for Apparel Items (US-sellers)

In Google's Product Taxonomy, the Apparel and Accessories category includes Shoes, Clothing, and Jewelry. You can assign the category of each item via the google_product_category attribute.

Any items assigned a category (or any subcategory) of Apparel and Accessories will require the information listed below.

  • gender - 'male', 'female', or 'unisex' are the only allowed values
  • age_group - 'adult', 'kids', 'newborn', 'infant', and 'toddler' are the only allowed values
  • color - must be the dominant color of the pictured item
  • size - required for Clothing and Shoes; accepted size values
  • material - if applicable
  • pattern - if applicable
  • image_link - the image must be of the specific color, material, and pattern (the specific size is recommended too)
  • brand - required unless item is custom-made
  • google_product_category - required (providing only the top-level category is okay, as long as you differentiate between Shoes and Clothing at a minimum)

See the following Google support articles for more information:

In order to meet these requirements, you have a couple options:

A. Submit Only One Variant for Each Product

You will need to add values to your store catalog for color, size, material, pattern, gender, and age_group. If a value is the same for all items, e.g. 'gender=female', then you can define a default value on the Manage Feed > Define Fields page.

For some store, you can also submit the first color and/or size option value. In that case, just make sure the main product image coincides with the first size/color option.

B. Submit All Variants of the Product

We have the capability to submit all variations of your items based on supplemental data you provide to us. This service requires a Custom feed and there is a setup fee. For more information, please refer to our Product Feed Multiplication Service.

Please consider our Data Feed Optimization Service. This one-time, flat-rate service, includes a review of your store data, configuration of your data feed, and a customized optimization report that includes a strategy for meeting the new requirements.

Options for Submitting Color Values in Data Feeds

There are several options when it comes to dealing with 'color'.

  1. Set a default value that applies to all items, e.g. "Black".
  2. Use the contents of a custom attribute or meta field, e.g. "google_color". You have to populate that manually in your catalog.
  3. Any combination of 1 and 2 is possible with our Standard feeds, and can be configured on the Manage Feed > Define Fields page.
  4. Custom programming to extract the actual product colors and split the item by each color (size, etc.). We have a service called Product Feed Multiplication to do this. This requires a Custom feed.

The above information also applies to other apparel attributes, such as 'age_group', 'gender', and 'size'.

Why is my item or product missing from Google Shopping?

In order to determine why items or products are not showing up in Google Shopping search results, please follow the instructions here. This will help you find out why the product listing is filtered, declined, disapproved, inactive, missing, under review, pending, disabled, hidden, etc.

Check Filtering Status

  1. Go to My Account
  2. Click Manage Feed for your Google feed
  3. Click Search by Keyword
  4. Type in the item ID/SKU or title. You can enter partial IDs and titles.
  5. If the item does not appear in the results box, please contact us.
  6. Click on the item in the results box to go to the Product Details page.
  7. If the product details have a strike-through effect, then the item is filtered out. Look at the top of the page to see matching filters.
  8. For example, a common filter is item_errors != ''.
  9. Look down in the product details for the item_errors or other field, to see the contents of the field. The item_errors field will contain all the errors that apply to the item.
  10. If the item has item_errors, go to Manage Feed > Google Validation Report to see a summary of the errors, with Help links explaining how to correct the errors.

Check Google Merchant Account

  1. If the item is not filtered out, then log into your Google Merchant Account
  2. Click on the Products tab
  3. Type in the full item ID in the search box, and click Lookup
  4. If the item does not appear, please contact us.
  5. If the item has a green check mark, then it is actively searchable in Google Shopping. If it has a yellow icon, it is not searchable and is under review. If it has a red icon, it is disapproved.
  6. If the item is disapproved, click the item title to view the item details. A message indicating why the item is disapproved will be visible.
  7. If the message is vague or generic, you must contact Google using their disapproved items contact form
  8. If the item has a yellow icon, wait a day or two for the review to be completed. If the yellow icon stays longer than that, please contact Google.
  9. If the item has a green icon, it is searchable in Google.

Check Google Search

  1. Search for the full, exact item title in Google Search, and you should see the item.
  2. If you are searching by other keywords, check if the exact search terms you are searching for appear in the product details, especially the first 70 characters of the title, and the first 140 characters of the description.
  3. If the search keywords do not appear in the product details, then Google's ranking algorithm has little reason to display your listing. Try adding the keywords to your title/description.
  4. If the search keywords do appear in the product details, then Google's ranking algorithm has decided not list your item for unknown reasons. You will have to try changing various product details until the item starts appearing again.
How To Remove or Delete Listings from Google Shopping

Use the instructions below if you need to immediately remove some or all of your Google Shopping product listing ads.

Remove All Listings from Google Shopping

  1. Go to the GMA Product Feeds page
  2. Check the box next to the data feed file name.
  3. Click the Delete selected button

Items can be restored by adding the data feed file back and resubmitting a feed.

Removing Individual Listings from Google Shopping

  1. Go to the GMA Product List
  2. Look up items by id using the search box, or page to the desired items
  3. Check the boxes next to the items you wish to delete.
  4. Click the Delete button

Items can be restored by resubmitting a feed containing the listings.

Removing Items Permanently from your Feed

Note that items may be re-uploaded with the next automated feed submission. If you need items to be removed from the feed permanently, please see these support articles:

The best practice for filtering items is to add a include-in-google custom attribute to your store catalog as a boolean yes/no field. Then, add a filter to exclude the items where include-in-google is false. This is described in detail in the Using your Store's Catalog section of the feed filtering instructions.

Feed file name is not unique - Google Merchant Center Error Solved

If you have a multi-client Google Merchant Center account, data feed file names must be unique across each sub-account. Otherwise, when you try to create the feed, you will see the error message: Feed file name is not unique.

To solve this problem, simply make up a different file name for each sub-account when you create the feeds. For example, you can set up file names like googlebase.zip, googlebase1.zip, googlebase2.zip, etc. Then, in our system, update the File Name setting under Manage Feed > Modify Feed Settings for each Google data feed. Now, each feed will be uploaded with the correct file name.

File names are case-sensitive, so be sure they match exactly. If the file name that is uploaded does not exactly match the registered file name, you will get an email from Google similar to the one below:

Subject: Google Merchant Center problem with data feed file: "GoogleBase.txt"
On February 12, 2012 1:01:01 AM PST you uploaded to Google Merchant Center via FTP a file named "GoogleBase.txt", but you don't have a data feed registered with this name. Please verify that you provided the correct file name, including correct capitalization.
How to set up Google Trusted Stores

Google Trusted Stores is a new program for merchants that allows you to submit your on-time shipping and service metrics to Google in exchange for special "trusted store" badge in search results. The program is now open to all merchants.

There are significant restrictions to the program, such as the requirement to have more than 100 orders on a rolling 28-day basis. Refer to the Performance Standards for details.

We do not currently support the shipping and cancellation data feeds that are required for this program, and we do not have a time-frame from when we might offer something. According to Google, they are working on direct, simplified integration with major e-commerce platforms. We do not have any knowledge of when this may happen.

For more information, please refer to the following links:

Google Merchant Center increase feed maximum item, product, offer quota or limit

By default, Google Merchant Center limits the number of items you can submit per file and per account. When this happens, you may see an error like Offer quota full, items rejected. The limit varies, and may be in the range of 50,000 to 200,000 or more.

If you need to submit more items to Google Shopping, you can use this special form to contact Google to request a increase in the maximum product count.

We can submit all the items in one feed, or we can split your feed into parts, with each file limited to 100k items. The maximum products per file is configurable, so that limit can be modified. This is part of our Standard feed service, so there is no additional charge. Please contact us if you need this set up.

Automatic item updates with schema.org microdata

Google Merchant Center recently added a feature called "Automatic item updates". This feature relies on schema.org microdata on your product pages to obtain up-to-date price and availability information about your products.

If you do not have schema.org microdata embedded in your product pages, you can not and should not enable this feature. If you do, then you will see errors in your account like, "Automatic item updates: Incorrect microdata price information" and "Missing schema.org microdata availability information". You can simply disable "Automatic Item Updates" to fix those errors.

Microdata is a short snippet of HTML that contains your product information. It has to be formatted a certain way. Here is a condensed example:

<body>
  <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
    <meta itemprop="sku" content="abc123" />
    <div itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer">
      <span itemprop="price">229.95</span>
    </div>
  </div>
</body>

The main advantage of this feature is that reduces the chances of a temporary item disapproval due to mismatched price or availability. However, you can achieve the same results by re-submitting your product feed whenever your price/availability changes substantially. Here are our recommendations:

  • Ensure your feed is set to Daily submission frequency from the Manage Feed > Modify Feed Settings page.
  • If available for your store platform, set your feed to Daily Plus submission frequency. This will automatically run a submission at least once per day and also within about an hour after you publish your store.
  • After significant changes to your catalog, run a Submit task on-demand by going to the Manage Feed page and clicking the Submit button. (There is no need to Refresh before submitting, because the Submit task also refreshes your product data.)

Remember, we do not charge any per-submission fees, so resubmitting/refreshing your feeds is always free. Also, our system fetches the latest product data from your store every time a feed is refreshed or submitted.

Recommended Settings for the 'Found by Google' Data Source

We recommend disabling the Found by Google data source in the Google Merchant Center Data Sources page.

Even though the page may say, "Google found additional products on your online store.", and provide a link asking you to "Start managing these products", this setting is not recommended.

Your feed service keeps your product listings up-to-date on a regular basis, using every possible product from your store. The feed filters out items that should not be listed, such as disabled products, hidden products, products with zero price, products with no images, etc. Therefore, enabling the 'Found by Google' setting will result in increased errors and warnings, and interfere with the feed service.

If the setting is already enabled, click the three dots icon under the Actions column, select Stop managing products, and then click Confirm. This will disable the setting.

For additional information, see our blog post, Automated Feed Website Crawl vs File Upload in Google Merchant Center.

Recommended Settings for Automatic Improvements in Google Merchant Ctr

Learn the recommended settings for Automatic Improvements in Google Merchant Center, along with reasoning for the recommendations.

Automatic updates

We recommend to disable all three types of automatic updates. The page should say:

  • Prices not updated automatically
  • Availability not updated automatically
  • Condition not updated automatically

Automatic image improvements

We recommend to set it to Images improved automatically if and only if you have Promotional overlay on image [image link] errors in your Google Merchant Center Diagnostics.

In all other cases, leave the setting at Images not improved automatically.

Rationale for Automatic Update Recommendations

Because we submit a accurate and up-to-date feed to Google with all your product data on a regular basis, there is no need for automatic updates for price, availability, and condition.

The way the automatic updates works is that Google's web crawler (Googlebot) scans your website periodically and guesses the values. Based on what we see on our clients merchant accounts, the guesses are often incorrect affecting about 1-5% of the product catalog. When the guess is incorrect, product listings will have warnings and errors, curtailing their visibility.

  • Warning - Automatic item updates active [condition]
  • Warning - Automatic item updates active [availability]

Disabling automatic updates will fix these errors and warnings.

Rationale for Automatic Image Improvements Recommendations

Google's specifications for image_link prohibit images with promotional overlays, such as calls to action, price/sale information, and any other text that covers the physical product image. Overlays can also be watermarks, brand names, and logos not part of the actual product.

By enabling "Automatic Image Improvement", Google will attempt to detect and remove the overlay using software. Because it could inaccurately remove legitimate parts of your product images, it is best to leave the setting off unless you have products that are disapproved for overlays. If you have products disapproved for overlays, then enabling this setting will fix that error.

Invalid or Missing microdata for condition

You may see a Missing microdata for condition notification in your Google Merchant Account. This message can be found under Diagnostics > Current Issues > Items, and likely affects all or most of your items.

To resolve this issue, first check to make sure Automatic item updates are disabled. In your Google Merchant Account, go to Settings > Automatic Item Updates and make sure to disable the settings if they are not already disabled.

If the setting is already disabled, then it is safe to ignore the message, because it is just a notice and does not affect your listings.

This issue appears to be a glitch on Google's part, because they should not be checking microdata on your website if you have disabled automatic item updates. Most likely, Google will correct the issue and the notice will disappear.

If you are still concerned, you can contact Google by phone, chat, or by using their contact form for item errors.

Of course, if you are one of the few merchants who has added microdata tags in your product pages, then you should leave the automatic item updates setting enabled, and verify that your microdata tags are there in the correct format. For more background information, see Automatic item updates with schema.org microdata.

How to migrate a Google Products feed

If have an existing Google Shopping feed and are switching to a feed uploaded by our system, here is the recommended procedure to migrate your feed.

First, you do not need to change your Adwords campaign.

In your Google Merchant Center (GMC) account, add a new feed called googlebase.zip and configure it as per instructions in our Google Feed Setup Guide.

Do not delete any existing feeds from your GMC account. Once the new feed is uploaded and processed, you can check for errors and resubmit if needed. You will see a warning that items are being uploaded through multiple feeds.

Once the googlebase.zip feed is processing well, you can delete the old feed from your Google Merchant Center Account and resubmit the feed from our system to get rid of that warning.

At this point, you may need to update Adwords campaign settings if any content changed between the feeds.

The feed uploaded by our system automatically removes and updates listings uploaded via any other feeds. However, if your listings were previously being uploaded via the API (rather than manually or by FTP), then the feed from our system will not remove those old listings. As long as the API updates have been turned off, those listings will expire automatically after 30 days. If those listings need to be removed sooner, please contact us and we can help you with that.

How to grant a user access to your Google Merchant Center account

Please follow the steps below to grant us Standard user access to your Google Merchant Center account. We recommend reading the instructions through before proceeding.

Access to your account is NOT required for your feed service. It can be helpful for troubleshooting though.

  1. Sign in to your Google Merchant Center account
  2. Click the gear (⚙) icon at the top of the page, near the center.
  3. Select Account access
  4. Click the + Add user link under the Users heading
  5. Enter the following email address:
  6. Click Add User
  7. Select the Standard role and uncheck all other roles
  8. Uncheck all email notifications
  9. Click Add User

The user will appear as Pending until we accept the invitation that Google sends us by email.

Alternate Option 1 - Screen shots

For quick troubleshooting, you can email us screen shots of relevant pages in your account using a free tool like Snipboard.io.

Please do not Email your Google Account Login and Password

We never require your Google account login/password, and we will never ask you for it. Please do not send us your Google account login/password. Even if you send it, it will not work, because Google requires two-step verification which we will not be able to bypass.

NOTE: Never send any account login/password by email, because email is inherently insecure. If you have sent it by email already, be sure to change your password. Instead, if necessary, you can use our Secure Login and Password Form to send us your non-Google credentials securely.

For increased security, we store merchant account logins provided to us off-site in an encrypted password manager.

Revoking Access

To revoke access, refer to the full instructions provided by Google here: User access for Merchant Center.

Automatic image resizing to fix 'image too small' errors

Google requires images to be a minimum size of 100x100 pixels (250x250 for apparel products). Here is what the specifications state:

For apparel products, images must be at least 250 x 250 pixels and can't be larger than 64 megapixels. For all other products, images must be at least 100 x 100 pixels and can't be larger than 64 megapixels.
Do not scale up images or submit thumbnails. We recommend the product to take no less than 75%, but not more than 90%, of the full image

You may see the following errors in your Google Merchant Center Diagnostics:

  • Image too small, resolve by September 1, 2016
  • Images too small

We can set up hosted image URLs in your Google Shopping feed that automatically resize your images to meet the new requirements. Our smart resizing algorithm automatically adds white-space, centers the image, and/or scales as necessary to create the perfect, proportional product image with the least amount of scaling.

This service can keep your products listed while you work on permanent improvements to your catalog. Please contact us for a quote.

NOTE: This service can also be used in Facebook Product Ads Feeds, to provide a perfectly-squared, distortion-free, 600x600 product image.

If you just have a few problematic images, you can use our free online image resizing tool for Google and Facebook

How to grant Standard User access to your Google Ads (Adwords) account

To grant us Standard User access to your Google Ads account, please follow the new, greatly simplified instructions below:

  1. Sign in to your Adwords Account
  2. Click Tools > Setup > Account Access from the top-right
  3. Click the blue plus button (Add User)
  4. Select Standard - Read only access, plus edit the account and its campaign as the Access Level
  5. Enter as the Email address
  6. Click the Send Invitation button

References

Google Search Console Product Snippets Structured Data Issues

In Google Search Console or via an email from Google, you might see errors and warnings regarding your product pages like:

  1. Missing field "aggregateRating"
  2. Rating value is out of range
  3. Value in property "reviewCount" must be positive
  4. No global identifier provided (e.g., gtin, mpn, isbn)
  5. Missing field "url"
  6. Missing field "brand"
  7. Missing field "review"
  8. Missing field "priceValidUntil"
  9. Invalid price format in property "price"
  10. Missing field "hasMerchantReturnPolicy" (in "offers")
  11. Missing field "shippingDetails" (in "offers")
  12. Missing field "highPrice" (in "offers")

These errors and warnings are not regarding your Google Product Search data feed. Instead, they are regarding the product markup in the product pages on your website.

Briefly, Product Markup is a set of tags for denoting product data (like price, title, image URL, ratings, etc.) hidden in the HTML of your product pages. Other terms for product markup are: Microdata, RDF-a, JSON-LD, structured data, or rich snippets.

Since Google is receiving your product data directly and regularly via an optimized data feed, the product data on your website is redundant.

Therefore, it is not necessary to resolve the errors and warnings for your Shopping Campaigns to be effective. However, for organic search results, you may want to resolve them

We do not provide any support for Google Search Console issues beyond the general advice here. Questions regarding those issues should be directed to your e-commerce platform or store developer.

Please refer to Providing product data to Google Search for current information on how Google prefers to receive merchant data.

Google Price-Inventory Supplemental Feed for High Frequency Updates

We offer Google Price-Inventory update feeds for Shopify and other shopping engines. These feeds include only three fields: id, price, and availability. They are useful for stores where price and availability changes frequently, and needs to be updated frequently.

These feeds run in 'reduced' mode so they can run faster. 'Reduced' means the amount of data retrieved from your product catalog is limited. For example, for Shopify, there is a big difference in speed because the feed does not individually fetch meta-fields for each item.

On a Shopify store with 200,000 items, the Price-Inventory feed runs in under fifteen minutes, as compared to the full feed which takes approximately two hours.

You will need to set up a Supplemental feed in your Google Merchant Center Account to process this feed. You can do this by creating a supplemental feed and using the "Take latest" rule to update your primary feed.

The Price-Inventory feeds are Standard feeds. If you need a custom schedule for the feed, please let us know.

WebGains Affiliate Product Feed

Our Google Shopping feed is fully compatible with the WebGains Product Update Data Feed.

You can find the URL of the Google Shopping feed on the Manage Feed > Download Data Feed File page of your account.

Select the format TSV, not CSV, in the WebGains feed section of your WebGains Advertiser Account.

Google Product Category for WebGains

Google Shopping now recommends that you leave google_product_category blank so that they can auto-categorize your items. WebGains requires google_product_category and will reject the feed if it is left blank.

If you are leaving google_product_category blank in your Google Shopping feed, there are two ways to resolve this conflict. You can subscribe to our Categorization Service were we set the google_product_category for your products. Or, can create a copy of the Google feed for WebGains and set a Default Value for google_product_category

Support Policy

While you are welcome to use the Google Shopping feed URL for any purpose, we can only support one channel per feed. If you require customization or full support, we can quickly create a copy of your Google Shopping feed specifically for WebGains (or other destination).

Can I have Google crawl my images again using the product feed?

In order to have Google re-crawl your product images immediately, we can append "?v=1" to each image URL. Google sees these as new images because the URL is different, and re-crawls them immediately, usually within a few hours.

The re-crawl may take up to 1-2 business days for stores with tens or hundreds of thousands of products in their feed.

Adding a URL parameter like "?v=1" to the image URL has no effect on the image itself, and the feed in general has no effect on organic search results.

If nothing is done, Google re-crawls images according to a slower schedule, presumably every three days based on their error messages.

This technique is helpful after you have made mass changes to images. It is also helpful when you encounter missing or invalid image errors, and the issue no longer exists.

After the re-crawl is completed, the "?v=1" can be removed or left in place. If another re-crawl is needed, then it can be changed to "?v=2", "?v=3", etc.

To add the URL parameter, you can contact us or follow these steps:

  1. Go to My Account > Manage Feed > Define Fields
  2. Click Edit for the image_link field
  3. Append "?v=1" to the Display URL value
  4. Click the Update button
  5. Go to Manage Feed > Submit a Task, and click the Quick Submit button

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