Google Merchant Centre is the entrance to your shopping empire!
This is the place where you house your products to be placed into Google Shopping.
Google Merchant Centre is a tool designed for those selling products online. This tool allows you to upload the list of products that you wish to sell in Google Shopping.
Why do I need Google Merchant Centre?
If you want your products to appear on Google Shopping results, you must have an Google Merchant Centre Account created as you cannot advertise in Google Shopping otherwise.
The search above was done on Vacuum Cleaners and these items were displayed on the right hand side of the results page.
All of these will have been uploaded via the Merchant Centre in order to appear there.
Getting Started with Google Merchant Centre
In order to use Google Merchant Centre you must have a Google Account. Visit google.com/merchants and click on “Create an Account Now” button.
Once you have signed up to your Merchant Centre, your Dashboard will look a little like this.
There will be nothing there and you will be prompted to claim your website at this stage.
If you look on the left there’s a list of actions that can be taken. Select “Settings” at the bottom and click on “Website Verification”.
At this stage you can verify your website in several ways and Google recommends to do it via HTML file upload.
But we will do it differently, we claim our website via Analytics, so click where it says “Alternative Methods” and tick “Google Analytics” option and click on “Verify & Claim”.
Now that you have claimed your website, it’s time to fill out all of the relevant information including the details of the business such as the name, address, contact details, time zone, language and delivery options as seen below.
Uploading your Product Feed and Start Selling
Once you have filled out of the details we can now move on into uploading your product feed. You can have up to 14 feeds.
On the left click on “Feeds” and then click on the red box that says “+Feed”.
The next screen you will see should be this one:
Select “Standard” mode, then select products under “Feed Type”, your target county and give the feed a name. Click continue.
On this next screen select the import type. In this case we have selected Google Sheets. Again click “Continue”.
Now note, there’s two ways of pulling the list of your products, you can either do it manually or you can do it on an upload schedule.
The image above shows how to upload the product feed on a manual upload.
Please note: This list should have either been downloaded from your website directly, obtained via RSS feed, collated on a spreadsheet list or manually created.
Alternatively you can get the information pulled from your website directly on a schedule which is what we recommend as it is always kept updated with stock and prices.
A great advantage of using Google Merchant centre is that this tool has an interface where you are able to see if product descriptions are too long, if you have product duplication, if you’re missing images or prices, if the prices are different from your website, if your image is unsuitable to be used in your adverts etc.
By using Google Merchant Centre you are also able to offer promotions and special offers.
But Google Merchant Centre does not function on its own. You must connect it to your Adwords account in order to allocate funds for bidding so that your products can show up in shopping results.
Let’s recapitulate: To put it in simple terms, Merchant Centre houses your products and claims your website, Adwords is a paid platform where you pay to display your products and Google is where you display them.
So you must claim your website by using a code, from that you must import your list of products with all the fields complete.
You then start bidding for your products to show up under the shopping results and your Google Merchant Centre empire has begun.
