In order to have your products advertised on Google Shopping the product data must have a specific minimum amount of attributes included when submitted to a Google Merchant Center account for approval. Your store must also include content and user policies that Google considers best practices to ensure consumer trust. The Google Shopping platform, previously known as Google Product Feeds, has grown and matured in recent years and now requires paid AdWords advertising campaigns to use the service.

• Information about Google's new requirements for product data
• How do I make these changes in a Merchant Solutions store?
• Enable and populate the Google Product Category attribute

To help make these changes easier for merchants to implement, we've made many updates to Catalog Manager that are specific to these new requirements, and are providing the following information and instructions.

The Commerce Central App Gallery, found in your Store Control Panel, also provides a Google Shopping app that automates the creation of the required Google accounts and adjusts bidding over time to make the best use of monthly campaign budget set by you. You need only set your monthly advertising budget let the app do the rest.

Making these changes is strongly recommended for merchants who wish to use Google Shopping advertising campaigns. If you want control over the AdWords campaign beyond the scope of our Google Shopping app, you may contact one of our Merchant Solutions developer partners that provides feed services to make these changes on your behalf.

Information about Google's new requirements for product data:

For up to date and additional information for any attribute listed below, see Google's Product data specification help article.

Google requires the following fields for all products:

• ID
• Title (Product Name)
• Description (Caption field)
• Link (the public URL for the product page)
• Image link
• Availability
• Price
• Brand - Required for all new products, except movies, books, and musical recording brands.
• GTIN - Required for all new products with a gtin assigned by the manufacturer. Our Google Shopping app uses the UPC for this value by default.
• MPN - Required only if your new product does not have a manufacturer assigned gtin. Our Google Shopping app uses the Code attribute for this value by default.
• Condition
• Adult
• Shipping Weight - Required when you do not use the Free Shipping setting in the Google Merchant Center.
• Shipping Length - Required for carrier-calculated rates in your account shipping settings in the Google Merchant Center.
• Shipping Width - Required for carrier-calculated rates in your account shipping settings in the Google Merchant Center.
• Shipping Height - Required for carrier-calculated rates in your account shipping settings in the Google Merchant Center.
• Tax - Required in the US only if needed to override the account tax settings for an individual item. We recommend that you submit tax information for all your products using the account settings in Merchant Center. If using our Google Shopping app, contact us to update your tax rates.

The following fields are also required if attribute applies to the product:

• Google product category - Highly recommended for all products, and required for Apparel & Accessories (166), Media (783), and Software (2092) categories
• Age Group - Required for all apparel items as well as all products with assigned age groups.
• Product Type
• Multipack
• Is Bundle
• Color
• Gender
• Material - Required if relevant for distinguishing different products in a set of variants.
• Pattern - Required if relevant for distinguishing different products in a set of variants.
• Size - Required for all apparel items in the Apparel & Accessories > Clothing and Apparel & Accessories > Shoes product categories as well as all products available in different sizes.
• Item Group ID - Required if the product is a variant and you are submitting all variant combinations.
• Max Handling Time - Optional (US only); The longest amount of time between when an order is placed for a product and when the product ships.
• Min Handling Time - Optional (US only); The longest amount of time between when an order is placed for a product and when the product ships.

The following fields are optional and recommended if applicable to the product:

• Additional image link
• Mobile Link
• Availability Date
• Expiration Date
• Sale Price
• Sale Price Effective Date
• Unit Pricing Measure - Optional, except when required by local laws or regulations.
• Unit Pricing Base Measure - Optional, except when required by local laws or regulations.
• Age Group
• Identifier Exists - No value when your new product doesn’t have either GTIN & Brand - or - MPN & Brand.
• Size Type - Available for apparel products only.
• Size System - Size Type - Available for apparel products only.
• Shipping - Item level default shipping cost when not adding Shipping Rules to a Google Merchant Center account.
• Shipping Label - Label that you assign to a product to help assign correct shipping costs in the Google Merchant Center account settings.

How do I make these changes in a Merchant Solutions store?

Google Product Category

Refer to Google's documentation to determine the correct Google category for your products, and review the Google taxonomy help documentation. Even if some of your products do not require the inclusion of the google-product-category attribute, we highly recommend that you do use it as it improves the effectiveness of AdWords Shopping ad campaigns and filtering on Google Shopping.

Please note that Google has specific product category requirements for apparel and accessories (including clothing and shoes), media (including books, DVDs, movies, and music), and software (including video game software).

If you sell apparel, please note the following: The color attribute is required for all products in Google's "Apparel & Accessories" product category, and size is required for all products in the Apparel & Accessories > Clothing and Apparel & Accessories > Shoes categories. Google states that you must also submit the age group and gender apparel attributes, and that the brand attribute is required for all apparel items unless the item is custom made. Please refer to Google's required fields information.

We now have included the google-product-category field to all product table(s) in the Shopping Attributes section, yet it must be enabled:

1. In the Products tab of Catalog Manager, click the Manage Tables link located near the top of the screen.
2. In the Manage Tables section, use the Manage table pull-down menu to select a product table.
3. Scroll down the page and locate the Shopping Attributes fields.
4. Click the [+] Add New Attributes link for the Shopping Attributes section on the far right.
5. In the Add New Attribute dialog, select the checkbox next to google-product-category in the list. We suggest you not make this attribute required unless you want to be sure all newly added products have it assigned. If a majority of your products fall under the same Google product category, you may wish to enter a default value and manually update products that belong to different Google product categories. Otherwise, leave this field blank.
6. Click the Add button. The google-product-category field will be added to the Shopping attributes for the product table.
7. If you have more than one product table, repeat steps 2-6 for each table.
8. Go to the Manage Products section of the Products tab in Catalog Manager and update the google-product-category field for each of your products with the correct Google product category, as defined by the Google taxonomy. If you do not see the field, you will need to change your displayed attributes settings. If you want to update many products with the same Google Taxonomy category at once, you may want to use the CSV Upload method.

Availability

Google now requires one of the following values for product availability:

• in stock
• out of stock
• pre-order

The Catalog Manager has been updated to make these values available to select, but action is required on your part to assign these values to your products. The value available to order is no longer supported by the Google Merchant Center. If you use our Google Shopping app, it should update Available to order to in stock automatically.

There are two ways to update the availability field for the new requirements.

Method 1: Removing and re-adding the "availability" attribute in Catalog Manager:

1. In the Products tab of Catalog Manager, click the Manage Tables link located near the top of the screen.
2. In the Manage Tables section, use the Manage table pull-down menu to select a product table.
3. Scroll down the page to locate the Store Attributes fields.
4. If you're using the availability field, click the Remove link for this attribute. Note: All availability values for your items currently set will be lost. (If you aren't already using the availability field, proceed to step 5.)
5. Click the [+] Add New Attributes link for the Store Attributes section.
6. Select the availability field by enabling its checkbox. Set this field to be required. You may also set a default value using the pull-down menu if you wish to apply the same value to all items in your product table. The pull-down menu will now be updated to include the in stock, available for order, out of stock, and pre-order values.
7. Click the Add button. The availability field will be added to your product table.
8. If you have more than one product table, repeat steps 1-7 to update your other product tables.
9. Click the Manage Products link located near the top of the screen, and edit your products as needed to set the availability status. Get help with editing products in Catalog Manager.
10. Continue to the instructions below for adding the image link field.

Method 2: Updating the "availability" field using a CSV file

1. In the Upload/Download tab of Catalog Manager, click the Download button located on the right side of the screen.
2. Select a table to download using the Choose Table pull-down menu, then click the Download button. Save the CSV file to your computer.
3. Open the CSV file and use the find-and-replace option to replace your current availability settings with in stock, available for order, out of stock, or pre-order. Save your changes. Note that while you may do a mass find-and-replace, the availability field for each item should reflect an accurate availability status.
4. Return to the Upload/Download tab of Catalog Manager and click the Upload button.
5. Define the table to upload using the Choose Table pull-down menu, and select the Add option. Click the Browse button to select the file to upload from your computer, then click the Upload button. Your CSV file will be uploaded.
6. Click the Commit button to commit your changes.
7. If you have more than one product table, repeat steps 1-6 to update your other product tables.

Image Link

This field is not needed if you are using our Google Shopping app as it is automatically collected by the app when submitting the products to Google. Follow the steps below only if you or a third-party will be managing Google Shopping accounts and ad campaigns for your store.

Add a custom field to your product tables called image-ink and set this field to be a non-required field. Once this field exists for your product tables, Turbify will populate this field with the product image location in your catalog.xml file if you need. This value may be overridden by you in your catalog.xml file if needed. If you do not wish to include an image link for one of your products, you may set the image-link value for this product as empty (using the word empty to define this).

To add the image-link field to your product tables:

1. In the Products tab of Catalog Manager, click the Manage Tables link located near the top of the screen.
2. In the Manage Tables section, use the Manage table pull-down menu to select a product table.
3. Scroll down the page and locate the Custom Attributes fields.
4. Click the [+] Add New Attributes link for the Custom Attributes section.
5. In the Add New Attribute dialog, enter image-link for the attribute name and select text for the format. Do not make this attribute required, and do not enter a value for the default value.
6. Click the Add button. The image-link field will be added to the custom attributes for the product table.
7. If you are have more than one product table, repeat steps 2-6 for each table.
8. Continue to the instructions below for adding the additional image link field (optional) or for adding the Google product category.

Additional Image Link (optional)

If you have multiple images for your products and already have an existing field defined for this, we recommend renaming this field to additional-image-link for recognition by Google. The catalog.xml will contain the location of the image.

Important note: If renaming an existing field to additional-image-link, please ensure that changes are reflected in your RTML templates to prevent broken images. If you are uncertain as to whether or not renaming an existing field for additional product images will require changes to your templates, please contact your developer.

To rename a field using Catalog Manager:

1. In the Products tab of Catalog Manager, click the Manage Tables link located near the top of the screen.
2. In the Manage Tables section, use the Manage table pull-down menu to select a product table.
3. Scroll down the page to the Custom Attributes section and click the Edit Attributes link.
4. All of your custom fields will open in the table for editing. Rename the desired field to be additional-image-link and click the Save button.

We strongly recommend that you review Google's documentation to ensure that updates to your feeds meet all of Google's requirements and specifications. Note: Google's documentation may instruct you to use underscores (_) in product attributes. However, Catalog Manager does not support the use of underscores. As such, use dashes (-) instead of underscores (_).