Listing your products on Google Shopping is a great idea if you want to grow sales of your Shopify products. It is obvious that when you add more Shopify products to Google Merchant Center, you’ll be able to earn higher sales revenue.
But, that needs some preparation on your part – you need to add all the required product information for Google Shopping. From our experience, what we’ve found is that most of the shops miss external product identifiers on their product attributes.
What are the External Product Identifiers or Unique Product Identifiers?
These are the unique values assigned to products which help for the purpose of identifying a product. When it comes to listing your products on Google Shopping, there are basically two types of identifiers:
i) GTIN – Global trade identification number
ii) Brand & MPN – Manufacturer part number
The best practice to sell on Google Shopping is to provide GTIN and Brand value of your products. However, you can also use Brand and MPN for new products if GTIN is not assigned to the product you are selling.
As a rule of thumb, if GTIN exists for your product, you should use it. However, while using the MPN value, you need to make sure that you are listing your products under the subcategory of Google product category. Here too, if your products and variations have GTIN number, you need to provide them while listing them.
When can you skip the GTIN and use MPN and Brand attributes?
For Google Merchant, this is generally defined by the Google Product Category you are selling. Look at the example for a clear view:
- Selling products under Apparels and Accessories – Your Brand Value is enough to list products
- Selling products under these subcategories of Apparels and Accessories – Your GTIN or MPN is required–
Only Apparel & Accessories with the explicit sub-categories of Shoes, Sunglasses, Handbags, or Watches require a valid brand and at least one other valid global-trade-data value (MPN or GTIN). Only Apparel & Accessories with the explicit sub-categories of Shoes, Sunglasses, Handbags, or Watches require a valid brand and at least one other valid global-trade-data value (MPN or GTIN). Source
Why so much focus on the Unique Product Identifier?
While sending the bulk product to Google Shopping, you need to provide a value in the column “identifier_exists”. The values are true and false for every row which represents your individual products.
If you send a false value on the identifier_exists column for the products that have Unique product identifiers assigned to them, you are risking your Google Merchant Center account suspension.
Next, it is an important attribute used by merchant sites like Google Shopping to properly categorize your products and display them alongside similar products – to increase visibility.
How to add the Unique Product Identifiers to products of your Shopify store?
- Login to your Shopify admin panel
- Go to Products on the sidebar menu
- Select the product that you want to add the Unique Product Identifier code
For variation – select the variation and follow the steps - Scroll down to the Inventory Section
- Enter your UPC or GTIN code on the Barcode textbox
- Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on Save button
If you need any help to send your Shopify product feed to Google Merchant Center without any UPC related errors, please feel free to contact our support team. And, if you haven’t yet tried our Shopify App, please check out the free trial
