New Google Shopping Feed Tools For Big And Small Retailers

Google introduced two new tools for retailers to make updating shopping feeds more convenient. One tool is suited for large retailers, in particular, to provide inventory and pricing updates quickly, while the other tool is designed to help smaller retailers get online with Product Listing Ads more quickly and easily using a Google Sheets add-on.

For Larger Retailers: Online Product Inventory Feeds

A new feed type enables retailers to submit updates on prices, sale prices and availability of key products. Retailers that update these attributes with regular frequency can now use online product inventory feeds to submit this data throughout the day on subsets of products for faster processing.

In addition to enabling fast on-the-fly updates, the other benefit is that any errors triggered in the online product inventory feed won’t affect the complete product feed, so there won’t be any interruption in ads being eligible to show.

The only attributes used in the new feed type are: ID, price, availability, sale price and sale price effective date. Files can be submitted in a text, tab delimited or XML file. More details are at the Help Center here.

For Smaller Retailers: Google Sheets Add-On

The second new update is an add-on for Google Sheets that should help small and mid-sized merchants create, upload and validate product feeds.

A sidebar in the add-on allows retailers to validate their data by individual row or for the entire Google Sheet. It shows errors and warnings before retailers have to go through the whole upload process.

Once the entire sheet is validated, merchants can upload their feed to Merchant Center right from the sidebar in Sheets. Results are displayed right in the sidebar.

For more information about using the add-on, check out the Merchant Center help page.