How to create a Google Shopping feed?

A presence on Google Shopping gives your products significant visibility and allows you to achieve a strong conversion rate. But how do you create a product feed to take advantage of this platform?

Required attributes for a Google Shopping feed

To be uploaded to the platform, your Google Shopping feed must have certain basic attributes that are common to all product types:

• general attributes: identifier, title, description, product type and Google product category (these are distinct), link, mobile link, image link, condition;
• availability and price attributes: availability, availability date, price, sale price, sale price effective date;
• delivery attributes: shipping mode, weight of package, etc.

Whether you use an XML feed or the Google Shopping API, the names of these attributes must be in English, and the words must be separated by an underscore (“image_link”). Most of these attributes are required (with the exception of “product type” which is recommended). If any of them are left out, the Google Shopping engine may not display the product in relevant search results.

The easiest approach is to create a grid of your products in Google Sheets (which works similarly to Excel): this allows you to take advantage of the templates available under “Add-ons.” The sheet must then be saved as a text file.

Google Shopping feed: conforming to the requirements

You can submit your Google Shopping feed in any of the accepted formats:

• Text (.txt);
• XML (.xml);
• Gnu zip, compressed text or XML (.gz);
• Zip, compressed text or XML (.zip);
• Bzip2, compressed text or XML (.bz2).

A debugging tool allows you to check your Google Shopping feed before submitting it, so you can correct any formatting issues.