First issue – what is a “product” under new Google Shopping rules? Every product, and every variant of every product, and every color/size combo of every variant of every product must now have its own unique id, which is “sealed” the first time you submit that product and shouldn’t change. That’s important. We’ll refer to that in this article as an “item”.

 

Second issue - what information needs to be submitted for every item? Since 22nd September, 2011 every item must have the following data fields:

title	image link	sale effective date	color	shipping
description	additional image link	brand	size	shipping weight
Google category	condition	GTIN	material	online only
product type	availability	MPN	pattern	loyalty points
link	price	gender	item group id	installment
expiration date	sale price	age group	tax	exluded destination

A few of these belong only to the apparel industry (marked like this ) or only to specialist groups (marked like this  ), so we don’t all have to worry about these.

title	image link	sale effective date	color	shipping
description	additional image link	brand	size	shipping weight
Google category	condition	GTIN	material	online only
product type	availability	MPN	pattern	loyalty points
link	price	gender	item group id	installment
expiration date	sale price	age group	tax	exluded destination

Ignoring for a moment the challenge of breaking our compound products into multiple items, many more of the required fields are already held within the AspDotNetStorefront database and can, one way or another, be extracted for submission. Some of these we all store and can be pretty relaxed about. We have marked those like this .

title	image link	sale effective date	color	shipping
description	additional image link	brand	size	shipping weight
Google category	condition	GTIN	material	online only
product type	availability	MPN	pattern	loyalty points
link	price	gender	item group id	installment
expiration date	sale price	age group	tax	exluded destination

Other AspDotNetStorefront fields might have been used by your administrators and might be easily accessible. Let’s hope so. We’ve marked those like this  ).

title	image link	sale effective date	color	shipping
description	additional image link	brand	size	shipping weight
Google category	condition	GTIN	material	online only
product type	availability	MPN	pattern	loyalty points
link	price	gender	item group id	installment
expiration date	sale price	age group	tax	exluded destination

And that leaves a handful of fields that will need to be either calculated, or manually populated.This might be manageable if it was a one-time submission, but we all need to remember that a change in our product set means changing our Google feed.

So that’s the challenge. We all need to break each product into items, assign lifelong IDs, extract some data and create some wholly new data, and then repeat that for our whole catalog. Then, tomorrow, when we add or change a product, we need to alert Google Shopping to the change.

There are many solutions. Many of you, we know, are smart enough to have engineered your own solution. Others have found (and paid for) services and widgets. Some of us have small enough catalogs to be able to re-key it all manually each time.