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Setting up a Google Shopping feed

This is a Help Center article of Channable, the tool for product feed management and PPC automation. If you don't have an account yet, create a free trial account now or learn how Channable can help you integrate your webshop with the Google Merchant Center.
Do you want to interactively learn how to set up a basic export feed, or some advanced techniques for setting up an export feed in Channable? Learn how to create a Channacademy account in the Channable app through this Help Center article and start with the Basic Feeds course or the Expert Feeds course.
Note: This article guides you in setting up a Google Shopping feed. If you are looking to setup a Google Shopping API, please follow this Help Center article.

General Feed setup

Follow these steps to set up your Google Shopping feed:

  1. Add a new Google Shopping Feed. First, create a new Google Shopping feed by navigating to "Feeds > Add new feed", search for "Google". Select "Google Shopping". 
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  2. Now, you need to select your target Country and the Type of market. You can also name the feed. Click on "Continue" to create the new feed.
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    Note: The fields you need to fill in the Finalize step greatly differ per Type of market. You can later change the market type in the feed settings if you chose the wrong one.
  • Set up the Categories for your products by using the generate categories feature, create new categories from scratch or by using the Smart Categorization.
    Google Shopping has its own product category tree and every Google category has an ID number. Therefore, Channable sends the Google category ID in the feed rather than the literal category path. Finally, you need to categorize 100% of the products you wish to push in Google Shopping. 

  • Create different Rules to optimize your product data. For example, take a look at our common rules article. In addition, Google does not allow HTML tags in the descriptions. Use the "modify text" rule to strip HTML. Finally, you can filter out products that have a price equal or lower than 0 ; that have no image and that are disabled or inactive on your webshop backend. 
    Important: Do not exclude products that are out of stock as Google works with the availability status of the products. 

  • Link the right fields in the Finalize step. Make sure to at least fill in all the mandatory blue fields.

    Tip! For a description of the channel fields, hover over the gray question mark icons on the right side with your cursor.
  • Check your feed in Quality. If there are any errors for mandatory fields, solve these first by optimizing your product data with rules and/or connecting the right fields in the Finalize step. Repeat if needed.

    Shipping information

    Note that the shipping.country and shipping.price are flagged as "mandatory" but you can also fill this information directly in your Google Merchant Center. This enables you to add multiple countries and prices for the same product. Therefore, you can ignore the Quality check error and leave those fields empty if you set it up in Merchant Center. It is possible to send multiple countries and prices for the same product through our Google Shopping API. 

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    Brand, EAN/GTIN and MPN

    Google only needs 2 or 3 of those fields to be filled for every product. The easiest way to do this is to make sure brand is filled a 100%  for every product and to try to either fill EAN or MPN (you can also use SKU here). If you can't fill 2 out of 3 of the brand, GTIN or MPN field, you'll get an error when uploading the feed into Google Merchant Center. You'll need to fix this with the identifier_exists field by following our Help Center article.

Once your Google Shopping feed is all set up, activate the feed in the Settings tab of the feed and run it. You will now see a URL in the Preview step that you can use to upload the feed to Google Merchant Center.

Important: Google supports automatic item updates for the price and availability from your website rather than the feed (or API). This feature is active by default but can be deactivated at any time. However, if you update the price multiple times a day, Google cannot guarantee the automatic updates will work. More information can be found here.

Uploading the feed to Google Merchant Center

Now that you have set up the feed, you can push the products to Google Merchant Center. To do so, please follow the steps in this article. This article shows how to connect the feed from Channable with your Merchant Center so it will be imported periodically in step 1B.