Google Shopping

You can upload your products to Google and utilise it as an additional sales channel. When someone searches for your products on google.com or google.com/shopping, your products will display. Customers will see a picture of your item, its price, and your store name when they search for it on Google. Customers who click on your advertisement will be routed to your website, where they can purchase your product.

To set up Google Shopping, you need to:

1. Click eCommerce on the left side of the page, and then click Manage Store.
2. After clicking All Sales Channels, click Google Shopping.
3. Click Enable.
4. Click Continue to Categories after choosing where you want to sell your products.
5. Choose a category for product storage on the Google site. Click Continue. Choose the category that fits all of your products and gives the best description of what they are. For example, if you sell games, puzzles, dolls, and other types of toys, you should choose the "Toys & Games" category because it fits all of your products. If you only sell "flying helicopters," however, you should choose the more specific "Toys & Games > Toys > Flying toys" category.
   
6. Set up the necessary product identifiers (Brand, GTIN, and/or MPN). Google needs you to set up specific identifiers so it can figure out which products you have in your store.
7. There are three different kinds of these:
   
8. Brand. The name of the brand or company that makes the product
9. GTIN. This is a unique number for a product, like a UPC in North America, an EAN in Europe, or an ISBN in the United States (for books). This is what the bar code looks like in numbers. Google uses GTINs to figure out what each product is and show what it is. Google Shopping won't list the products with the wrong GTIN.
10. MPN. It is a set of numbers and/or letters that the company that made the part gave to it. Each part that the company makes has its own MPN. This lets the company know which company made the part.
11. Here is where you can find a full explanation of these identifiers: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/160161.
12. Google requires merchants to set at least two of these identifiers for their products in order for them to be approved and listed in Google Shopping. If you don't have one of these identifiers, check this section to see what you can do instead.
13. All of these things can be added as attributes to your products. The UPC and Brand attributes are already set up to make things easier for you. You can set up an MPN attribute by hand.
14. For these identifiers to be added as attributes:
15. Go to the Store Control Panel, click Catalog, and then click Products to add these identifiers as attributes.   
16. Next to the product you want to change, click Edit Product and then click Attributes.
17. There are two default attributes available here: Brand and UPC (equal to GTIN). Configure them right here.
18. Click Manage attributes and add MPN to the list of attributes.
19. Go back to Catalog > Products and set up your products' MPNs.
20. After enabling the tool, you may begin your campaign. You'll need an AdWords account and a Merchant Center account to handle your product advertisements and listings. Using your existing Google account, you can manage all campaigns from a single location.  If you don't have a Google account yet, it's time to make one.
21. Log in to your Merchant Center account and select Data Feeds from the left-side menu.
22. Click +Data Feed.
23. Select Target country and Format from the drop-down menus. Select a name for your data feed file and enter it in the Data feed filename field. Save your changes. The feed URL produced in StoreFront should NOT be included in the Data feed filename. It can have whatever name you like. I want to use Google Spreadsheet to store, edit and upload my feed option should not be selected.
24. Locate the new feed and click the Create schedule option. In the resulting pop-up box, enter the frequency of feed uploading and the Feed URL (the URL of your feed may be found in the Store Control Panel > Promotion > Google Shopping).
25. Schedule feed uploading by clicking the Schedule button or Schedule and fetch now to begin submitting feeds instantly.
26. While items are retrieved, please wait. It takes time and often relies on the number of things in your store.
27. Create your Google Shopping campaign here.
    

Troubleshooting

Missing shipping information or Missing tax information

Ensure that Shipping and Taxes are set on the Google Merchant Center side at http://www.google.com/merchants/taxshippingsettings page. Regardless of whether the purchase is done on your store's side, you should add the same parameter on the Google Merchant Center side as well.

Missing required attribute: gender, colour or age group

Automatic item updates: Missing schema.org microdata price information

This message indicates that Google attempted to identify schema.org markup on your product pages but was unable. The schema.org microdata price information is a specific markup that enables Google to automatically update the prices of goods in your Google Shopping feed whenever they change. Please see this post for further information: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6069143#

There are essentially two ways to maintain accurate shop information in your Google Shopping account:

Once an uploading schedule for a data feed has been established, the information in your Google Shopping account will always be accurate, and you may disregard the "Missing schema.org microdata" warning.

• The products schema.org microdata. This markup will display on your product pages after Google AJAX indexing for your store has been enabled. If you utilise plugins for WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal, it is enabled by default and you do not need to do any more steps to make it function. If your website was created using a different platform, you can deploy Google AJAX Indexing on your own. The schema.org markup will be immediately applied to your shop upon completion.
• Scheduled feed update.  You may schedule the feed update for your Google Shopping account. The StoreFront generates a feed that is updated every 12 hours, ensuring that your inventory and prices are always accurate.
• You should not bother about these settings to ensure that your Google Shopping feed is always current. The XML feed is updated once each day. Therefore, you should configure the automatic upload feature in Google Merchant Center. This option allows you to link your Google Merchant account to the feed URL, which can be found in your Control Panel > Promotions > Marketplaces > Google Shopping page.

Once an upload schedule for a data feed has been established, the information in your Google Shopping account will always be accurate.

Feed is rejected as the checkout page is not secure

Google demands that the store's checkout pages use a secure connection - they must be SSL encrypted and have a valid SSL certificate - through HTTPS. Here is a comprehensive list of standards that must be met for your website to be authorized for Google Shopping. https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188486?hl=en

Please note that the StoreFront checkout is handled over a secure connection and is completely safe (HTTPS). However, Google requires that the URLs to the pages on your website begin with https://

Therefore, in order to publish items to Google Shopping, you must acquire and install an SSL certificate on your website.

FAQs