Getting your products listed in more places can reduce friction when customers want to purchase from you. Image: Flickr / mikekline / CC-BY

If you sell a product or service, getting listed in Google Shopping search can be a boon to your business. The basics of setting up a product feed are simpler than you might think.

A note for affiliates

As an affiliate, product feeds can be an effective way to drive traffic to your website. However, tread carefully. Read the rules and regulations of your affiliate agreement very carefully, and always err on the side of caution. Product feeds work best if you are working directly with the product supplier, have a skinned web store or offer your own products.

Get your products in order

Google product feeds are essentially carefully coded lists of the products and services you offer. Unless you have that list organized for yourself, putting it in the Product Feed format will be very frustrating. If you have your products in a web store, exporting the database into a spreadsheet can be the simplest solution.

Create a formatted data feed

Laying out the items in a spreadsheet is the easiest way to format the feed correctly. Each item will need:

• id: The product ID, which should be unchanging
• title: up to 70 characters of text that includes important keywords, such as color or brand. Promotional text and ALL CAPS are not allowed.
• description: Up to 1,000 characters about the product. This is the information that Google scrapes in order to put your items in product search results.
• google_product_category: The Google category your product fits into. Find a full listing from Google. The full taxonomy should be included, and in text it should appear like this example: Food, Beverages & Tobacco > Food Items >
  Candy, Sweets & Gum > Candy & Chocolate … etc.
• product_type: Your categorization of the item. You can “stack” these categories and include multiples.
• link: The landing page to your exact product page. This page cannot have pop-ups, must not be re-directed and must not require sign-ups or passwords.
• image_link: The full-size image of your product, at least 400×400 pixels. This should be just one single product image, the main image. This is required.
• additional_image_link: Any additional product images, a minimum of 250 x 250 pixels in size. By including this attribute multiple times, you can include up to 10 additional item images.
• condition: new, refurbished, or used are the only three values accepted in this attribute.
• availability: “in stock” if it can be shipped within three days. “available for order” if it will take four or more days to ship. “Out of stock” if orders are not being accepted or “preorder.”
• price: The price, not including tax in the U.S. The price must be fixed, must include a currency and must be total price (not a per-unit price.) This should not be a sale price.
• sale_price: This should be the same formatting as the regular price and must match what is on the website.
• online_only: This is a “y” or “n” option. If you do have physical locations, then submit those location through Places to include nearby stores.
• expiration_date: The final date that an item should be displayed

This is a basic listing of the attributes that can be included in Google products. See a full listing of the available attributes on the Google Product Feed page.

Save and upload your feed

Save your feed as a tab-delimited text file. Make sure you have signed up for the Google Merchant Center and claimed your URL. With those two things done, upload your product feed file. Make sure you have analytics ready to track incoming traffic from Google Product Search, and keep a close eye to ensure you catch initial errors quickly.