Google Merchant Center helps online merchants to get their products into Google shopping platforms in many countries, especially in the US. You can export your store’s product feed into Google in several formats and then tweak the products individually and in bulk if needed. + There are many additional setup options. When your products satisfy Google specs, you’ll be eligible to show them in premium shopping listings of search channels, which may greatly expand your selling coverage.
There are 2 options to get your products featured on Google Shopping channels, free and via ads. We can disable ads to use only the free option unless you want to use the ads system.
Woocommerce WordPress shop can easily connect to the Google Merchant Center with several free and commercial plugins.
Free Plugins to Use
If you have a store with less than 100 products, you can easily use the WooCommerce Google Feed Manager plugin for free. It’s a stable plugin with a good rating. I’ve tried it and it was good and easy to implement and use.
But recently I’ve tried a newer plugin called Product Feed PRO for WooCommerce by AdTribes that has almost no limits for exporting product feeds to Google. The plugin is a bit hard to set up, but possible.
The only important trick here is to perfectly match Google shopping attributes with the shop’s feed values. After connecting the feed, i.e. as an XML link to Google, you’ll easily see what field values are missing or make some errors. The plugin has a good knowledgebase to help.
Enhancements and Tweaks for Feeds
- We can also include some static values, i.e. brand if it’s a single brand store.
- Important to get unique product identifiers of different types of products to be compatible with Google specs for your store’s model. There is an explanation on knowledgebase here.
- Additionally, we can add more images from the shop to Google Shopping.
- Filters and rules allow the exclusion of some products that don’t fit in or just out-of-stock products.
So I was able to set it up easily enough and validate products on Google after several tries and tweaks via the plugin’s interface. Hope it’ll bring more customers to the store.