Ahead of the holidays, Google Merchant Center sees substantial upgrades

A new suite of tools has arrived for merchants — just in time for the 2017 holidays. The new upgrades include helpful feed expansions, rules and overrides, as well as the ability to add multiple members to Merchant Center accounts.

These new changes are currently available to all accounts created on or after July 13, 2017, and are rolling out to everybody over the next month. Here’s a look at the changes that have been announced:

New Supplemental Feeds
One of the biggest changes to Merchant Center is the ability to modify an existing feed with a new supplemental feed using various data sources. A new supplemental feed will give merchants the ability to use an existing product feed from a site and layer on additional information such as seasonal promotions, custom labels and other values and attribute changes. There will now be two variations of feeds: Primary Feeds and Supplemental Feeds, and some pre-existing feeds may be labeled as “legacy feeds” — which will continue to work.

A Supplemental Feed cannot add or remove a product, but it can update product data in the primary feed. The ability to layer a Supplemental Feed onto a Primary Feed will be a massive time-saver and should allow retailers to create better, fresher ads for searchers.

Multiple-country submission from a single feed
Another new feature is the ability to create a feed that can be submitted cross-country and cross-language. This multicountry feed allows for additional combinations of countries and languages for a primary feed. The primary feed can have a target country added, as well as the content language.

Feed Rules for product data
The integration of Feed Rules and product data from the Content API gives retailers the ability to modify a feed on the fly every time it is submitted. This is a huge upgrade for small and mid-tier retailers that have limited development capacity. A Feed Rule can replace values to make sure they are compliant with Google Shopping Products Feed Specifications, populate missing attributes and create shipping values based on product weight values.

Team-based Merchant Center accounts
No longer will there be one primary and one technical contact for a Merchant Center account. Additional users can now be added as “admin,” “standard” and email-only users to the account. Users will then be able to manage their notification options themselves.

Look for these changes to roll out in the coming month for older accounts, and you may find these active in newer accounts. Overall, these new upgrades should be a welcome sight for marketers headed into their peak season.

For more information, see the official Google blog post.