Merchant Centre and Shopping Feed

If you want to get your products into Google Merchant Center (which powers Google Shopping), you’ll need a product feed. Pakk makes the process as painless as possible.

Yet another Google data portal that you, as a site owner, need to worry about. I hope you like blue graphs, because there’s a whole lot more coming at you again.

Merchant Center is shopping focused. It’s about getting your product data into Google’s radar so it can list them in both organic and paid product listings.

Multi Brand

As a Pakk customer, it’s quite likely you’ll want to run multiple sites out of your Merchant Center, so the first thing I recommend you do is request upgrade to a “Multi Brand” account. You can do that from inside the “Advanced” settings in the “Account Settings”. They say it can take a few days to approve your request - it’s always been more or less immediate for me.

There’s quite a lot to set up in Merchant Center - its mostly business details, address, phone, branding etc etc. Spend the time to do it properly - Google Shopping listings are a powerful way for your customers to find you.

Once you’ve got all the metadata set up, you need to get your products in. Luckily, that’s easy with Pakk. It can take a day or so for the products to appear but once they are in, they should get updated regularly. Keep an eye on it though.

XML Product Feed

Pakk uses the XML feed format and your feed can be found at https://mydomain.com/gm.xml. Remember to replace ‘mydomain’ with your site’s actual domain.

You don’t need to do anything to activate your feed within Pakk, it is always available by default at the above endpoint. Remember though, that you do have to submit/configure your feed in your Google Merchant Center.

Feed Options

There isn’t much you need to do to get your feed ready for Google. There are, however, a couple of settings at product level that you might wish to tweak:

• Google Product Category: it helps your feed if you categorise your products according to Google’s product taxonomy which can be found online. Set up the categories you wish to use in your Account Settings, then on each product, select the category to which it belongs.

• Pause: if you temporarily need to pause selling a product in Google Shopping for whatever reason, it’s better to pause it in the feed rather than completely deleting the product. You can achieve this by selecting the ‘Pause’ option.

• Exclude: this will completely exclude the product from your feed

Custom Labels

Example of cusom labels on a product in the Google product feed

Google allows up to 5 custom 'labels' to be included in the product feed. The purpose of these labels is to make ad campaign management easier when Google Product Feed is linked to Google Ads. Pakk uses these labels as follows:

• custom_label_0: possible values are N or Y signifying whether a product has been marked as 'prioritise' in Pakk

• custom_label_1: is the 'margin classification' for the product as calculated by Pakk. Possible values are 0 (losing money), 1 (below target) and 2 (above target)

• custom_label_2: is a custom text tag that can be selected on the product. Note that the tags avaiable to select must be set up by an account admin on the account settings page

• custom_label_3: is an indication of stock availability based on a threshold. By default the threshold is 100 units, but this can be overriden at product level. The possible output values are 0 (none at all in stock), 1 (1 unit in stock), >100% (more than the threshold), 75-100%, 50-75%, 25-50%, 10-25%, 5-10%, 1-5% and <1%, all of which represent declining stock levels relative to the threshold.

• custom_label_4: currently unused

Other Important Fields

As well as the custom labels listed above, the XML feed includes lots of fields that you can use to optimise your bidding once you've linked your Google Merchant account to your Google Ads account:

• availability: this is a Google mandated field that describes the stock availability of the product

• cost_of_goods_sold: the purchase price in base currency of the item

• sale_price: if the product has a direct discount applied, then the reduced price is shown here

Other Factors to Consider

• Images are required by Google. A product that doesn’t have at least one image will not be included in the feed.

• Google requires feed prices to be inclusive of VAT, so whatever price setting you have on your site, the price submitted to Google will be inclusive of VAT. Bear in mind however, that for sites that show prices excluding VAT, this will mean a conflict between the feed price and displayed price, which Google doesn’t allow. Therefore, it should be noted that Google Shopping shouldn’t be activated on sites that show only Ex. VAT pricing.

Resources

• https://www.google.com/basepages/producttype/taxonomy-with-ids.en-US.txt

• https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324436?hl=en