Shopping Feed Integration – All Platforms

Helpful Fields

GTIN – This is typically either the UPC or EAN number – Not all products have these, so it must not be a required field, but if the products do have them it’s a really good idea that they populate this. It makes a big difference on Google Shopping, as well as Amazon. There is some info on this here: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324461?hl=en&ref_topic=6324338 These numbers would come from the manufacturers and its the type of data that most of our customers would add when they are creating the products in their Point of sale system.

Color – The basic rule of color is that it needs to be a descriptive color, and using color numbers is not valid. So the color “Black” is fine, but “000000” or “9807ABC_mid” are not. It can be a totally custom name like “mango explosion” that’s totally OK, just needs to be descriptive. The color that is in the feed should also show on the product page. So if we send “mango explosion” as the color in the feed, that is what should show when you add the product to your cart or view the product detail page.

Age – There are several valid age groups:

  • newborn
  • infant
  • toddler
  • kids
  • adult

You can read about it here:

You can see the age ranges are:

  • Newborn [newborn]
    0-3 months old. Newborn sizes are often identified by the age range in months (0–3) or just “newborn.”

  • Infant [infant]
    3–12 months old. Infant sizes are often identified by the age range in months (3–12).

  • Toddler [toddler]
    1–5 years old. Toddler sizes are often identified by the age range in months (12–24) or years (1–5).

  • Kids [kids]
    5–13 years old. Children’s sizes are often identified by the age range in years (5-13).

  • Adult [adult]
    Typically teens or older (13 years old or more). All sizes within this age group have been manufactured to fit an adult or teen.

Gender – There are 3 valid values for gender:

  • Male [male]

  • Female [female]

  • Unisex [unisex]

When to use “Brand”

Brand – This is not always set up on our sites. Some clients will use brands in categories. This is not ideal as we cannot easily feed this into google shopping. So having the brand or manufacturer set up in Magento or WooCommerce, etc. even if it is hidden on the front end is extremely useful for shopping feeds.
Google says when this field should be included – 

  • Required for each product with a clearly associated brand or manufacturer.

  • Required for each product where the manufacturer is also the merchant (for example, homemade and custom-made products).

  • Optional for any product that doesn’t have a clearly associated brand (for example, movies, books, music, and posters).

  • Only provide a brand if you’re sure it’s correct. When in doubt don’t provide a brand (for example, do not guess or make up a value).

Size Attribute – There are certain standard size labels that if used are beneficial to our customers. The idea is to have something that is descriptive and follows the standards when there are standards set.

Google covers this here –  You can see for example here is a list of “standard sizes” that apply to all countries, if you look at the link you will see they have other sizes for Shoes, or for Pants, even for baby sizes. The more we can get the customers to adopt these values, the better off they will be. It’s not feasible in every situation but if it is possible, it’s best if it’s used.

Another Point that is sometimes a bit tricky with size and color sometimes is that the types of values are mixed. So you will see a color in a Size attribute. Or they will need both a size and a width value, but will have everything in “size”. The ideal situation is to have the different types of value separated into their own attributes.

So for example if they had products that needed these different values they would break into different attributes instead of being limited to size and color.

Size

Width

Length

inseam

Waist

Color

By breaking these into separate attributes, they have excellent filtering on the site, and we can have really excellent product feeds to Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. This will likely require pushing the integration team to properly map this sort of data

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