Getting Started with Google Shopping

Google Shopping is the row of product images, prices and shop names that appears above or beside ordinary search results. For a shop it is often the highest intent placement available, because the person clicking has already seen your product and your price.

Photo by Kindel Media on Pexels

The useful part, which not everyone realises, is that a good share of it is free. Getting listed costs you nothing but the setup work.

What you actually need

Three things: a Google Merchant Center account, a product feed, and a website that meets Google’s requirements. The third is where most people come unstuck, so it is worth doing first.

Get the website right before you start

Google checks your site before approving your products, and rejections here are the commonest reason a new account stalls.

Contact details. At least two ways to reach you, clearly visible. A contact form alone is often not enough; include an address, a phone number or an email.

Returns and refunds policy. Must exist, be easy to find, and state the return window and who pays for return postage.

Delivery policy. Costs and timescales, visible before checkout.

Terms and conditions, and a privacy policy.

A working checkout. Google’s reviewers will attempt one. A broken basket, a payment method that errors, or a required account registration that fails will get you rejected.

HTTPS throughout, and particularly on the checkout.

Note how much of this overlaps with UK consumer law. If your shop already complies with the requirement to show the total price including unavoidable charges up front, and to state cancellation rights before purchase, most of Google’s list is already satisfied.

Setting up Merchant Center

1. Create an account at Google Merchant Center using the Google account you want to own it long term.
2. Verify and claim your website. The simplest route is through Google Search Console if you already have it, otherwise an HTML tag or file upload.
3. Set your business information, including the country you sell in and your currency.
4. Configure shipping. This is compulsory and it must match what you actually charge. Set up rates by destination and, if relevant, by weight or order value.
5. Configure returns. The window and conditions, matching your published policy.
6. Turn on free listings so your products can appear in the unpaid results.

Shipping and returns are where inconsistencies bite. If Merchant Center says free delivery and your checkout charges £4.95, that is a mismatch and a suspension risk.

The product feed

The feed is the list of everything you sell, with the attributes Google needs.

Required for every product:

• id, a unique, permanent identifier. Never reuse one for a different product.
• title, up to 150 characters. This does most of the matching work, so lead with the useful words: brand, product, key attribute. Not your shop name.
• description, up to 5,000 characters. Write for the customer, not for keywords.
• link, the product page URL.
• image_link, a clean product image on a plain background, no watermarks, no promotional text overlaid. Promotional overlays are a very common disapproval.
• availability, in stock, out of stock or preorder.
• price, including tax for UK consumers, matching the page exactly.
• condition, new, refurbished or used.

Effectively required for most products: brand, and a gtin where one exists. The GTIN is the barcode number, and supplying it lets Google match your listing to the same product elsewhere. Products without one are shown far less often. For products you make yourself with no GTIN, supply mpn and set identifier_exists to no.

Worth adding: sale_price, google_product_category, product_type, and the variant attributes item_group_id, colour and size if you sell variations.

Getting the feed to Google

Four routes, in increasing order of reliability:

Manual upload of a spreadsheet. Fine for a handful of products, unmanageable beyond that, and always out of date.

Scheduled fetch, where Google collects a file from a URL on your site daily. This is the right answer for most shops. Your store generates the feed, Google fetches it, and stock and prices stay current without anyone doing anything.

Content API, pushing changes as they happen. Worth it for large or fast moving catalogues.

Automatic feeds from structured data, where Google builds the feed by crawling your product pages. Convenient, and much less controllable. If your product pages carry correct structured data this can work, but a proper feed gives better results.

If you run CubeCart, our own Google Merchant Centre Feed plugin generates the feed from your catalogue at a URL you can point a scheduled fetch at, which puts you on the second option without building anything.

Why products get disapproved

Expect some. The usual causes, in rough order of frequency:

Price mismatch. The feed price does not match the landing page, usually because of tax handling or a sale that ended. Google checks automatically and this is the single most common rejection.

Availability mismatch. Marked in stock, page says otherwise.

Missing GTIN on branded products that should have one.

Image problems. Watermarks, promotional text, placeholder images, or images too small.

Missing returns policy at the account level.

Restricted products. Some categories are prohibited or need extra approval.

Merchant Center lists every disapproval with a reason. Work through it rather than resubmitting and hoping.

Free listings and paid campaigns

Once your products are approved, free listings put them into the Shopping tab and, increasingly, into ordinary results. Turn this on before spending anything.

Paid campaigns run through Google Ads, linked to your Merchant Center account. Most Shopping advertising now runs as Performance Max, which combines Shopping with other placements and gives you less granular control than the older campaign type.

Our advice for a small shop: get the feed clean, run free listings, and see what happens for a month. You will learn which products Google is willing to show, and fix the data problems, before you start paying for clicks on a feed that is not right.

Where to start

Fix your returns and delivery policies, then create Merchant Center and verify your site, then get a feed in via scheduled fetch, then turn on free listings.

Expect the first submission to throw up problems. That is normal, and the errors are specific enough to act on.

If you use our e-commerce hosting and want a hand getting a feed set up or working through a list of disapprovals, get in touch.