Set Up a Google Shopping Feed

The Google Shopping Feed is built into Shoporama and updates completely automatically. Below, you can read about how to set it up and customize it, as well as what it supports. If you need a feed in a different format, you can also build your own feeds.

Assign a Google category to your products

To get the most out of Google Shopping, your products should have a Google category. This is Google’s own list of product types, and it helps Google display your items in the right search results. You can view the full list on Google, but you don’t need to look anything up. Just search directly in the field in Shoporama.

You can assign a Google category to your products in two ways:

• At the category level: Select a Google category from your own categories. All products that have that category as their main category will automatically inherit it. This is the easiest and fastest way, since your products likely already have a main category.
• On the individual product: If individual products need a Google category different from their main category, select it directly on the product.

Here’s how to do it at the category level:

1. Go to Content → Categories.
2. Edit the category you want to assign a Google category to.
3. Find the Google Category field under Search Engine Fields, and enter a keyword directly into the field, such as “coffee” or “dresses.”
4. Select the category from the list that best fits. The list shows the category name, its path, and the Google ID.
5. Click Save on the category.

Here’s how to do it for a product:

1. Go to Products and edit the product you want to assign a Google category to.
2. Expand the Product Feeds tab.
3. Type a keyword in the Google Category field. A new window won’t open; the results appear right below the field.
4. Click the category that best fits. You can also use the arrow keys and Enter; pressing Esc closes the list.
5. Click Save on the product.

To change the category, click the selected category and search again. The checkmark removes it. Category names are displayed in the language you use for the admin interface, but the ID is the same in all languages, and it is the ID that is sent to Google. If you’ve previously entered an ID or text in the field, the value is retained: an ID is displayed along with the category name, and any previous free-text entry is displayed as-is.

Note: If the product has its own Google category, that category is used in the feed. If you leave the field blank for the product, the Google category from the product’s main category is used. You can read more about IDs in Google Shopping Category IDs for Products.

Activate your Shopping feed

Now all you need to do is activate your feed. Here’s how:

1. Click Webshop in the left-hand menu, then select General
2. Click the Feeds tab
3. Check the box next to “Enable Google Shopping Feed?”
4. If you want your best-selling products marked as “bestsellers” with a label, you can select a number. If you enter 30, we’ll mark the 30 best-selling products from the past 24 months.
5. If you only want products with a specific markup in your feed, you can fill in the field that says “Include only products where the markup is at least.” Here, you must enter the amount in the store’s currency (not as a percentage). For example, enter “30” if you want a markup of 30 on the product. This requires that you’ve entered the cost price for your products.
6. Click “Save.”

The URL for your shopping feed is located directly below the setup section.

The product ID in the feed is the key to catalog matching

Each product in the feed has a unique ID in the g:id field. This ID is more important than it might seem at first glance: It’s the key that both Google and Meta (Facebook and Instagram) use to link ads and tracking events to the correct products in the catalog. If your tracking sends an ID different from the one in the feed, the platforms cannot match your events with the products, and dynamic ads and catalog sales will not work.

By default, the feed uses the product’s numeric ID in Shoporama. Variants are assigned an ID consisting of the product’s ID and the variant’s ID, separated by a colon. You usually don’t need to worry about this, because Shoporama’s built-in tracking automatically sends the same ID in all events, ensuring that the feed and tracking always match. You can read more about the relationship between Product ID and catalog matching, as well as how to set up Meta tracking in the Facebook Conversions API.

Country and Language Feeds: Product Number as ID

If you have multiple online stores on the same Shoporama account—for example, a Danish and a Swedish store—you can enable country and language feeds. The setting is located in the same place as the rest of the feed setup: Go to Webshop → General, click the Feeds tab, and check the box next to “Enable country and language feeds?”. Note that this setting only appears if your account contains more than one online store, and that it must also be enabled for the other online stores in the account.

When country and language feeds are enabled, two things happen:

• The feed changes its ID scheme. Instead of a numeric ID, the product’s stock keeping unit (SKU) is used as the ID. For variants, the variant’s own SKU is used, if it has been entered. The SKU is the stable key that links the same product across your country-specific stores.
• You’ll get two additional feeds: a country feed and a language feed that aggregate products from your stores. Links to both feeds appear directly below the setting in the admin panel.

Shoporama’s built-in tracking is automatically included: When the feed uses SKUs, your tracking events also send SKUs, so catalog matching continues to work without any additional setup.

How often is the feed updated?

The feed updates automatically in the background. You don’t need to press a button or take any action to reflect your changes. There is no manual “update feed” function in Shoporama because it runs entirely on its own.

Here’s how it works in practice:

• When you edit a product (price, inventory, images, description, categories, etc.), the product’s data in the feed is updated immediately after you save. The entire feed is also marked as outdated, so the next time someone fetches the feed, a fresh version is delivered.
• The entire feed is also automatically rebuilt in the background every two hours if there have been changes to your products. If there have been no changes, Shoporama skips this rebuild to conserve resources.
• The cache for each product in the feed typically lasts 2 to 6 hours, but is refreshed immediately when you edit the individual product. So changes to a product appear faster than the time limit might suggest.

If you, as a store owner, want to ensure the fastest possible update on Google, you can set up a daily feed retrieval in Google Merchant Center at a time that suits you (e.g., early in the morning). For critical corrections, Google also offers a “Fetch Now” feature in Merchant Center that forces an immediate retrieval of your feed URL.

Customize the product in the Product Feeds card

On each product, you’ll find the “Product Feeds” tab. Here, you can control how the product is included in Google Shopping and your other product feeds. In addition to “Google Category,” which is described above, the tab has three settings.

Google Shopping Title

By default, the product’s name will appear as the title in your feed. But this isn’t always the most appropriate choice. For example, you might have some dark blue shorts from Ralph Lauren called “Polo Ralph Lauren Prepster.” But that won’t trigger your ad when a user searches for “blue Ralph Lauren shorts.” That’s why you can enter a different title in the Google Shopping Title field. This way, the new title will appear in your feed, helping you rank ahead of your competitors. If you leave the field blank, the product name will be used.

Google allows a maximum of 150 characters, and the counter below the field shows how many you’ve used. However, Google only displays the first approximately 70 characters, so put the most important information first—such as the brand, product type, and color.

Condition

Under “Condition, ” select whether the item is “New,” “Used,” or “Refurbished.” “New” is selected by default, so you only need to change this for items that aren’t new. Use “Refurbished” for items that have been professionally restored, such as a refurbished cell phone. It is sent to Google as “refurbished.”

Show in Feeds

Under “Show in feeds,” you can choose whether the product should be included in each individual product feed. There is one line per feed— Google Shopping, Partner Ads, and PriceRunner—and each line has Show and Hide buttons. If you select Hide next to Google Shopping, the product will not be included in the Google Shopping feed, but it will still be available in your online store and included in the feeds marked Show.

These buttons replace the old checkboxes under “Exclude from feeds.” Your previous selections have been saved, so you don’t need to do anything.

Variants
If the product has variants, each variant is sent as a separate item, and the variants are grouped together under a single item_group_id so that Google knows they belong to the same product.

Which products are included in the feed?

The feed contains the products that are online in your store and that a customer can actually purchase. This is not the same as "products with stock greater than zero." Three groups:

• Items with stock: are always included and are listed as “in stock.”
• Items out of stock that customers can still order: These are also included. These are the products for which you’ve checked the “Allow negative stock” box in the product’s Stock Management card. They’ve always been included in the feed.
• Items without stock that cannot be ordered: are excluded. If you want to include them anyway, check the box for “Include products that are out of stock” under the “Feeds” tab. They will then be listed as “out of stock.”

In addition, products for which you’ve selected “Hide from Google Shopping” under “Show in feeds” in the “Product Feeds” card, as well as gift cards and similar items, are excluded. If you’ve set a minimum markup requirement under the “Feeds” tab, products that don’t meet that requirement—and products with no purchase price at all—are excluded.

If your products have variants, each variant is included as a separate product. Variants that you’ve disabled for the product are excluded. This is useful if multiple products share a broad profile, so that empty variants without a price do not end up in the feed at 0 DKK. Read more in Active Variants.

Items that can be ordered but are not in stock

If you have items that customers can buy now and have delivered later, Google has a specific inventory status for exactly that: backorder. This tells Google that the item can be ordered but isn’t currently in stock. Items with a backorder status are still eligible for both Shopping ads and free product listings.

You can enable this under Webshop → General → the Feeds tab:

1. Check the box for “Send backorder items as ‘backorder’ instead of ‘in stock.’”
2. Fill in the Expected delivery time for backordered items (days). Google requires an expected delivery date for backorders, and we calculate it as today’s date plus the number of days you enter. If you enter 14, the item will be assigned a date 14 days from now, and it will automatically adjust so that the date never falls in the past.
3. Save. The change will take effect in the feed with the next update.

This setting is turned off by default, so you decide when to enable it. If you’re using one of Shoporama’s themes, the product page is already set up. If you have your own theme, you’ll need to update the stock status on the product page so that it also says “backorder.” This is described in “Implement Structured Data.”

Additional things you should know

Discounted products
If your product has both a price and a sale price, both will appear in the feed.
There will also be a label labeled “on sale” on the product.

Other
If your product has a GTIN, an MPN, or a brand associated with it, these will also be included in the feed.

If you’ve marked a profile attribute with a “Special Purpose” (size, color, or gender), we’ll be able to extract this into the <g:size>, <g:color>, and <g:gender> fields. Note that for <g:gender>, there are only three valid values: Male, Female, and Unisex.

The product’s main category will appear as <g:product_type>

Custom Labels for Google Ads

The Google Shopping feed supports custom labels (custom_label_0 through custom_label_4). Custom labels are used in Google Ads and Google Merchant Center for rules and to segment your products into campaigns and manage bidding, so you can, for example, bid higher on bestsellers or discounted items.

Automatic Custom Labels

Shoporama automatically sets two custom labels for you:

• custom_label_0 is automatically set to “on sale” for products with a sale price lower than the regular price.
• custom_label_1 is automatically set to “bestseller” for the best-selling products, if you have configured the “bestseller count” under the Feeds tab (see the section on activation above).

You cannot fill in these two yourself. For your own values, you have custom_label_2, custom_label_3, and custom_label_4, which you can fill in in two ways: using product labels or using additional fields on the individual product.

Custom labels via product labels

1. Go to Products → Product Labels in the menu.
2. Create a new label (or edit an existing one).
3. Select custom_label_2, custom_label_3, or custom_label_4 in the Google Shopping custom label field, and save.
4. All products with that label will automatically have the label name as the custom label value in the feed. If a product has multiple labels that use the same custom label, the names are sent separated by commas.

You can easily apply labels to multiple products at once directly from the ABC Analysis and Inventory Statistics overview, so you can, for example, mark all your A-products or dead stock with a specific label. Learn more about labels in Product Labels.

Custom Labels via Extra Fields

You can also enter custom labels directly on individual products. Expand the “Fields” tab and enter one line per custom label in the “Extra Fields” field:

google-custom-label-2=summer
google-custom-label-3=high-margin
google-custom-label-4=own-import

If you can’t remember the format, expand the “Google Shopping Custom Labels” box just below the field. It shows the three lines you can use.

Product labels are easiest to use when many products need to have the same value, because you can set and remove them for multiple products at once. Extra fields are useful for values that vary from product to product. Your theme may display extra fields on the product page, but the default themes do not display custom labels. For example, Montana and MontanaB2B display additional fields in the “Product Details” table but skip fields that start with “google-custom-label-”. If you have a custom theme that displays all additional fields, ask your developer to do the same.

Also display star ratings on your Shopping ads

In addition to product data, you can send your product reviews to Google so that star ratings appear alongside your products in Google Shopping and Shopping ads. This is a separate feed that you sign up for under "Product reviews" in Merchant Center. Learn how in “Get Stars in Google Shopping with Product Reviews.”

Frequently asked questions

How quickly will my changes appear in the feed and on Google?

You don’t need to press any buttons. The feed itself on Shoporama is typically updated within a few seconds to a few minutes after you save the product. Google Merchant Center and price crawlers usually fetch the feed once a day, and you can manage this in their systems. If a correction is urgent, use the “Fetch Now” option on your feed in Google Merchant Center.

Do I need to select a Google category for every single product?

No. Select a Google category for your categories, and the products will inherit it from their main category. Only the main category matters, and a Google category assigned to a parent category does not carry over to the subcategories. Only assign a Google category to the product itself if it needs to be different from the category’s.

I can’t find the right Google category when I search. What should I do?

Use just a few words, because all the words must be in the category or the path above it. Try searching for the beginning of the word, e.g., “dress,” and you’ll get both “dress” and “dresses.” If you know the Google ID, you can also search by the number, e.g., 1868. If you can’t find an exact category, select the closest parent category from the list.

When should I choose “Refurbished” instead of “Used”?

Select “Refurbished” when the item has been inspected and professionally refurbished so that it works like new, such as a refurbished phone. Select “Used” when the item is being sold “as is” after having been used. You don’t need to do anything for new items, as “New” is the default.

Can I exclude a product from PriceRunner but keep it in Google Shopping?

Yes. Expand the “Product Feeds” tab on the product page, and select “Hide” next to PriceRunner and “Show” next to Google Shopping. The product will still be online in your store. However, if you take the product offline, it will disappear from all feeds during the next update, because the feeds only include products that are online.

I have both a product label and an extra field in Custom Label 2. Which one is used?

The product label. If the product has a label that fills in Custom Label 2, the label’s name is sent, and the line “google-custom-label-2” in Extra Fields is ignored. Custom labels 3 and 4 are determined separately in the same way, so an extra field is still used for a custom label that none of the product’s labels populate.

How long should my Google Shopping title be?

You can enter up to 150 characters, but Google only displays the first approximately 70. Therefore, put what customers search for at the beginning—for example, brand, product type, color, and size. The rest can come afterward and help Google understand the product.

Why aren’t my products being matched in Meta’s catalog?

Meta matches your tracking events against the catalog using the product ID, so the event ID must be identical to the feed ID. By default, the ID is the product’s numeric ID in Shoporama, and for country and language feeds, it’s the item number. Shoporama’s built-in tracking always sends the same ID as the feed. If you use country and language feeds, all products must have an item number; otherwise, the ID field will be empty. Read more in Product ID and Catalog Matching.

My products are in the feed, but Merchant Center shows far fewer active products. Why?

Count the number of products in the feed file itself and compare it to the number of active products in Merchant Center. If there’s a significant difference, the products have been submitted but rejected by Google. The most common reason is that the feed shows “in stock,” while the product page shows “out of stock.” Check under Diagnostics in Merchant Center for an error regarding inconsistent inventory status. The solution is the backorder setting described above.

We sell a lot of items on backorder. Should we enable backorders?

If you have many products that customers can buy even when they’re out of stock, then yes. That’s the inventory status that fits the situation, and it keeps the products visible instead of risking Google deactivating them. If you don’t want to pay for ads on made-to-order items, manage this in Google Ads, and you’ll keep the free product listings.

Need help? Contact us at support@shoporama.dk.