Google has introduced two new tools for retailers to make updating shopping feeds more convenient that before. The first tool is one suited for large retailers, providing inventory and pricing updates quickly. The second tool was designed with the small businesses in mind, allowing them to get online with Product Listing Ads easier and quicker using a Google Sheets add-on.
The first tool for larger retailers is called Online Product Inventory Feeds, and this enables retailers to submit updates on prices, sale prices and availability of key products. If you’re a retailer who updates these attributes with regular frequency, this is good, as you can use online product inventory feeds to submit this data throughout the day on subset sets of products. This will allow for faster processing.
The other benefit of this tool is that if any errors are triggered in the online product inventory feed, the complete product feed won’t be affected. This means that there isn’t going to be any interruptions in ads being eligible to show.
The attributes used in this new feed type includes:
- ID
- Price
- Availability
- Sale Price
- Sale price effective date
Files will be able to be submitted either as a text, tab delimited or XML file. Click here for more details at the Help Center.
The second tool, meant for small businesses is the Google Sheets add-on. If you’re a small or medium sized business, this is for you, as it will help you create, upload and validate product feeds.
You will find a sidebar in the add-on that will allow retailers to validate data by individual row, or for the full Google Sheet. It will show any errors or warnings before retailers go through the entire upload process. This could easily save time.
After the entire sheet has gotten validated, merchants will be able to upload their feed to Merchant Center right from the sidebar in Sheets. The results wil be displayed right in the sidebar.
check out the Merchant Center help page for more information on the add-on.