Thursday 25 September 2014

Google Shopping Specification Changes - 30 September

On 30 September Google is updating their feed specifications. They are adding some  extra fields to improve search accuracy and making some changes to fields that you should already have.

These changes won't impact the majority of feeds, but they may make your feed more accurate and more useful to Google, and therefore, more valuable to your business. 

It can be difficult going through the Google help guides, so we've condensed the changes here:
  • Availability attribute - this is being simplified by combining the 'available for order' value with 'in stock'. If you use the 'available for order' for pre-orders this should be changed to 'in stock'.
  • Character length limits - Google are adding limits to how much you can write in your titles, descriptions and other attributes. These limits are quite generous and shouldn't affect too many people. Your Merchant Centre reporting will notify you if any products exceed the limit. You can see what these limits are here: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188494. 
  • Mobile landing pages - if you have a non-responsive site (an m. site) you can now specify landing pages. This cuts out the time taken for normal URLs to redirect to mobile sites and improves the mobile shopping experience.
  • Merchant-defined bundles - if you sell products as part of a bundle you can now specify that some products can be bought together. 
  • Apparel attributes - to make searches for clothing more accurate new categories have been added to the 'age_group' attribute and new size attributes  have been created. These are 'size_system' and 'size_type'.
These are the main changes. If you have any doubts about whether your feed will continue to work, please get in touch and we'll help you work out what you need to do.

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