Google Shopping Capabilities of the IRP

This article describes some of the key data that is required and used by Google Shopping Feeds.

Firstly the article covers the model data that is required for a product to be included in a Google Shopping Feed.

There follows two tables that detail which feeds are available in which countries, which languages are allowed, whether English is available and whether English is a secondary language of the feed. Unique currency names and ISOs are also described.

Finally, changes are described in Feed Specifications from the previous setup to the current one.

The following data is required for a product to be included in a Google Shopping Feed:

• Model must be active
• Model is not marked 'Kit Item Only'. If the Model is a Fixed Kit, the ‘is_bundle’ attribute will be set to the value 'yes'.
• Stock must be active
• Brand must be active
• Category must be active
• Must have a price (i.e. cannot be a free item)
• Must have an image
• Must have a short description:
  • For territories where English is the target language, an English short description must be present
  • For territories where English is not the target language, there are two options:
    • Use English short description where translated version is missing
    • Only include product when a short description in the target language is present — these feed specifications are post-fixed with '(Strict)'

There are additional exclusions that can be set up based on the Feed Exclusions functionality — this would only be for items that cannot be shipped to the target territory, or are banned from being advertised on Google Shopping either by the manufacturer/supplier or for legal reasons.

There is a setting against each model, Has Manufacturer-Issued UPIs, which indicates whether the items in the model should have one of the following database fields populated correctly:

• ISBNNumber — ISBN Number of books
• UPCAPartCode — UPC-A article number
• EAN13PartCode — EAN-13 article number
• PartCode — Manufacturer Part Code

ISBN, UPC-A and EAN-13 all relate to an item's 'barcode'. The PartCode field is generally assigned to the product by the manufacturer to uniquely identify it in their product range. For the vast majority of branded products, there should be at least one of these values assigned to them.

Your feeds will not include these products unless you have populated one of these four fields correctly.

If a product does not have any of the identifiers, e.g. hand-made jewellery, unchecking the 'Has Manufacturer-Issued UPIs' checkbox against the model in question will allow the items within it to go up in your feeds. However, Google will quickly realise if you are sending products that actually do have these values, and you simply haven't entered them into the IRP.

Availability

In Stock status will not affect whether an item in is the feed. However, the availability field is populated according to the following criteria

If an item has InStock > 0 or StockHeldExternally, it will go up with the value 'in stock'. In all other circumstances, it goes up with the value 'out of stock'.

The following table shows which feeds are available in which countries, which languages are allowed, whether English is available and whether English is a secondary language of the Feed.

Info Source: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/160637

The following table describes unique currency names and ISOs.

The following table details the changes in Feed Specifications from the previous setup to the current one. In the 'Notes' column, the meaning of the numbers is as follows:

1. Returned products restricted to those with Translated Descriptions only
2. Introduction of custom labels
3. New ID Suffix
4. New ‘is_bundle’ attribute. This will be set to the value 'no' unless the Model is a Fixed Kit - in this case the value will be 'yes'