Having only an eCommerce website is not enough in this digital world. Though, Google is providing an amazing feature of Google Shopping with zero cost. You will let Google know about your products and as a result, it helps people to find you in a better way. So here I describe Google Merchant Center and how it works.
What is Google Merchant Center?
Google Merchant Center is a digital platform where you can promote your products to Google and make them available to customers. Moreover, Your products will appear across Google Shopping, Google Ads, Google My Business, and other services.
Google Merchant Center’s main benefit is to allow you to submit complete and suitable ads for your products to Google Shopping. You can then edit immediately so that your customers always have access to valid information.
Why you need Google store?
Google is the most used search engine on the planet. These days, People are finding anything first on Google instead of some other website. Hundreds of millions of potential users may increase your traffic and eventually the number of conversions on your website.
Without the Merchant center, you won’t be able to configure product advertisements. Also, your business will be limited to Google Ads, and you will miss out on an opportunity.
Apart from this, you can collaborate with your Shopify, Magento, Woocommerce, or any other eCommercewebsite with Google Merchant store and promote your products with the most used search engine and as result, you will get higher engagement to your website.
Does Google Merchant Center cost anything?
NOOO!! The great news is Google Merchant Center is entirely free to use. But Although, you have to pay for clicks on your Google Shopping ads.
What is a Google Merchant feed?
A Google Merchant Center feed is also known as a Google Shopping Feed or a product data feed. In other words, it is a file that organizes key information about your products in a way that Google can easily understand. It will provide a file that contains a list of products you want to advertise through the Merchant Center.
There are multiple types of feeds in the Merchant Center that depends on the structure of your product.
- Primary and supplemental feeds:
- Primary feeds are the main data sources for your Merchant Center inventory.
- supplemental feeds add data that are missing from your primary feed. you can only update your product information with this feed.
- Product attributes: Attributes are the data points that describe a product that includes ID or Title. Attributes help people more easily search for and find your items.
How do I get started with Google Store?
Here are step-by-step guides on how to get set up on Google Merchant Center.
- If you don’t have one already, sign up for a Google Account.
- Verify your business through Google My Business.
- Go to www.google.com/merchants and get started
- Enter information (like name, Country, and primary contact info) about your online store
- Accept the terms and conditions.
- Verify and claim your online store’s website.
- Set up a data feed.
- Add your product data for each of your products to the Google Spreadsheet for your data feed.
You’re all set!
How do I add products to Google Merchant Center?
- Importing an XML. or txt. feed file or a Google Spreadsheet with your entire product catalogue
- you can manually update your feed and then upload it to the platform.
- Via Content API or using FTP / SFTP.
Steps to upload your products to Merchant Center via a feed file:
- In your Merchant Center account, navigate to ‘Products’, then ‘Feeds’ [ Add Image ]
- Click the blue plus button to import your data feed.
- Name your feed and select the import method.
- Provide a link to your data feed and choose the best time for the daily updates.
- Provide other necessary info such as target country, destinations etc.
- Save your feed. Once saved, your product data will be prepared and you will shortly see a product data health report in the Diagnostics section.
Steps to add your products to the Merchant Center manually, one by one:
- In your Merchant Center account, navigate to ‘Products’, then ‘All products’
- Click the blue plus button to add a product.
- Provide all the required product data, and save.