How to Build a Google Shopping Product Feed, Step by Step

Building a product feed is mostly careful data work. You take your catalog, express each product in Google’s attribute format, connect it to Merchant Center as a data source and keep it in step with your website.

This guide assumes your Merchant Center account exists. If it doesn’t, start with the Merchant Center setup guide. For background on what a feed is and the different data source types, see what is a product feed.

Before you build: account prerequisites

A perfect feed will still struggle if the account around it isn’t ready. Check these first:

• Business information. Google requires basic, verifiable business and identity details, including business name, address and customer service contact. See add your business information.
• Verified and claimed store URL. Product links must use the verified domain. See how to verify and claim your website.
• Shipping. Shipping settings or the shipping attribute are required in countries including the US.
• Return policy. Your website must state one, and Merchant Center lets you configure it in its shipping and returns settings.

Step 1: Choose how the feed will be created

Your choice of data source decides how much of this guide you do by hand.

If you…	Consider
Run Shopify	The Google & YouTube app, with a supplemental source for gaps
Run WooCommerce	The Google for WooCommerce extension, or a feed plugin that exports a file
Have a small catalog and no platform app	The Google Sheets template
Have an export tool or custom platform	A file delivered by upload, SFTP or Google Cloud Storage
Have a large catalog, or prices and stock that change more than once a day	The Merchant API

If you use a platform app, the app builds the records for you. The attribute guidance below still applies, because you’ll be checking and correcting the values the app sends.

Step 2: Build one record per product variant

Export your catalog with one row for every purchasable variant. A t-shirt in 3 sizes and 3 colors is 9 rows. Each row gets its own id and they share an item_group_id. Don’t add a row for the parent product.

Then decide where each attribute’s value comes from in your store. Practitioner tip: write this down as a simple mapping (feed attribute, store field, any transformation). It makes troubleshooting much faster later and stops different people mapping the same field in different ways.

Feed attribute	Typical store field
id	Variant SKU
item_group_id	Parent product SKU
title	Product name plus variant details
description	Product description (plain text)
link	Variant URL
image_link	Variant image, or main product image
price, sale_price	Regular price, sale price
availability	Stock status
gtin, brand, mpn	Barcode, brand or vendor, manufacturer part number

Step 3: Fill each attribute correctly

The rules below come from Google’s product data specification and the individual attribute articles. Work through them in this order, because later attributes depend on earlier ones.

id

Use 1 to 50 characters; Google recommends the SKU. Keep the id unique and stable: changing it overwrites the product and its history. Use the same ID for the same product across countries and languages, don’t recycle IDs for new products, and avoid whitespace and invalid Unicode characters.

title

Required, 1 to 150 characters. Describe the product exactly as the landing page does, put the most important details first and include the variant (color, size). No promotional text, prices, all caps or company name. Our titles and descriptions guide covers this in depth.

description

Required, 1 to 5,000 characters. Describe only this product, with the most important details in the first 160 to 500 characters. Don’t include links, category paths, comparisons with other products or store policies.

link

The landing page URL for this exact variant. It must start with http:// or https://, use your verified domain and URL-encode symbols (a comma becomes %2C). Google’s landing page article recommends no more than two redirects. Variants need distinct URLs, for example using query parameters such as ?color=green&size=small.

image_link and additional_image_link

One URL for the main image, plus up to 10 additional images. Google’s image requirements say JPEG and WebP are recommended, the file extension must match the real format, and images must be crawlable by Googlebot and Googlebot-image. From January 31, 2027, Google requires at least 500 x 500 pixels for all products and recommends about 1500 x 1500 or above. Use stable URLs without timestamps or session IDs, and no promotional overlays or watermarks.

price and sale_price

Submit the full regular price in price, in the currency of the target country. If the product is on sale, add sale_price (Google’s example format is 15.00 USD) and, ideally, sale_price_effective_date with the correct time zone; without dates, the sale applies immediately. If a product is on sale but you don’t submit sale_price, submit the sale price as price. Details are in how to handle sale prices.

availability

Use in_stock, out_of_stock, preorder or backorder. Preorder and backorder need availability_date, and the expected date should appear on the page. The value must match what the landing page shows for that variant.

brand, gtin, mpn and identifier_exists

Submit the manufacturer-assigned GTIN and brand wherever they exist, and brand plus MPN when there’s no GTIN. Never invent or copy identifiers. Use identifier_exists = false only for products that genuinely have none. See GTIN, MPN and brand explained.

condition

Required for used and refurbished products. Google suggests using “new”, “used” or “refurbished” in the title or description so the condition can be cross-checked.

item_group_id and variant attributes

Use the parent SKU as item_group_id (1 to 50 characters) and keep it stable. For apparel, submit color, size, age_group and gender on every variant. Group variants the same way your product page’s variant selector does.

shipping, shipping_label and return_policy_label

Most stores set shipping and returns at account level. Add shipping_label or return_policy_label only where a group of products needs a different policy, and the item-level shipping attribute only to override account settings for specific products.

Step 4: Format, name and encode the file

If you’re using a file or sheet, small formatting problems cause many processing errors. Check these before the first upload:

Area	What to do
File name	Use the exact file name you enter when creating the data source, with a valid extension and no special characters
Header row	Use Google’s attribute names (id, title, link and so on)
Encoding	Use UTF-8; avoid invalid Unicode such as control characters (for example U+200D) in IDs
Whitespace	No leading, trailing or repeated spaces in IDs or titles
URLs	ASCII characters only for image URLs; URL-encode symbols such as & (%26) and commas (%2C)
HTML	No HTML tags in titles; no links in descriptions
Escaping	Escape XML or JSON properly, without double-encoding
Prices	Number plus currency code; Google’s sale price rules allow at most two decimals
Numbers in spreadsheets	Format GTIN and ID columns as text so leading zeros survive (practitioner tip)

Step 5: Add the data source in Merchant Center

Google’s data source guide gives this path for a primary source:

1. Go to Settings > Data sources and open the Primary sources tab.
2. Select Add product source.
3. Choose the method: file, Google Sheets or API (with a platform app, products are connected through the app instead).
4. Set the target countries and the language of your product data.
5. Add a data source label and choose the marketing methods (such as free listings and Shopping ads).
6. Name the source and, for files, enter the exact file name.
7. Upload or connect the data and wait for processing to finish.

If you use the Advanced data source management add-on, decide on feed labels now. Language and feed label can’t be changed after the source is created.

Step 6: Check the first results

1. Open Products > Needs attention and read the summary cards and issue list.
2. Fix processing errors first (invalid values, missing required attributes). Data source errors explains the common ones.
3. Pick 10 to 20 products across categories and compare each attribute with its live landing page as a logged-out visitor.
4. Check structured data on a few pages with Search Central’s Rich Results Test or URL Inspection.
5. Fix values at the source, then re-upload or reprocess the data source.

Expect a few rounds of this on a new feed. Practitioner tip: keep a short change log of what you fixed and when, so you can match later status changes to your edits. Remember that an approved product is eligible to show, which Google notes is not a guarantee that it will.

How often to update your product feed

There’s no single correct frequency. The right schedule is whatever keeps your feed in step with your website, because Google compares the two.

Match the feed to your site’s change rhythm

Google’s availability mismatch article names timing between site updates and data updates as a common cause of mismatches, and recommends scheduling data updates to coincide with site updates. If stock changes during the day, a once-a-day feed will be out of date for part of every day.

How your catalog changes	Reasonable approach
Prices and stock rarely change	A daily file or sync, plus a manual update after any planned price change
Stock changes daily	Update at least daily, timed to run after stock imports; keep automatic item updates on
Prices or stock change more than once a day	Google recommends the Merchant API
Scheduled sales	Submit sale_price with sale_price_effective_date in advance

What automatic item updates can and can’t do

Automatic item updates use your landing page and structured data to update price, sale price, availability and condition. They’re on by default. But Google is explicit: they are not a replacement for regular updates and are designed for sporadic problems on a small share of products. If values change more than once a day, products may be disapproved instead, and Google may stop the updates if there are too many mismatches.

Don’t delete products to hide them

Removing a product and re-adding it later means it takes significant time to show again, according to Google’s availability documentation. Use pause for up to 14 days, or excluded_destination for longer, rather than deleting items or marking in-stock products out of stock. See managing out-of-stock products.

Shopify and WooCommerce notes

• With the Google & YouTube app, products sync from Shopify automatically or manually. Make changes in Shopify; edits made directly in Merchant Center may be overwritten.
• If your Shopify store uses several domains or redirects, the app may claim a domain that doesn’t match your product URLs. Google’s fix is to set the online store URL in Merchant Center to the domain used in product URLs and claim it.
• With Google for WooCommerce, the extension handles the product feed. Check which product fields it reads for brand, GTIN and MPN before you fill them in.

When to get help

Building a feed for a small catalog is manageable in-house. Get help when your platform can’t send the attributes you need, variants don’t map cleanly, or you’re seeing recurring mismatches after launch. Our product feed optimization service builds and maintains feeds, and our Merchant Center service covers account setup.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Google Merchant Center Help — Create a product data source
• Google Merchant Center Help — Product data specification
• Google Merchant Center Help — ID [id]
• Google Merchant Center Help — Title [title] and structured title
• Google Merchant Center Help — Description [description]
• Google Merchant Center Help — Image link [image_link]
• Google Merchant Center Help — Sale price [sale_price]
• Google Merchant Center Help — Availability [availability]
• Google Merchant Center Help — Item group ID [item_group_id]
• Google Merchant Center Help — How to fix: Product page unavailable
• Google Merchant Center Help — How to fix: Mismatched product availability
• Google Merchant Center Help — Automatic item updates
• Google Merchant Center Help — Feed labels
• Google Merchant Center Help — Add your business information
• Google Merchant Center Help — Install and link the Google & YouTube app on Shopify
• WooCommerce Docs — Google for WooCommerce: Get started

Last reviewed October 10, 2026 against the official documentation listed above. Google changes Merchant Center features and policies regularly — always confirm details in your own account.