How to Sell On Google Shopping? A Complete Guide

To sell on Google Shopping, you need to create a product feed from your WooCommerce store and submit it to Google Merchant Center. Once your product data meets Google’s requirements (such as title, price, GTIN, and image), your products can appear in Google Shopping through free listings. For greater visibility and faster results, you can also promote your products using Google Ads.

Getting started involves three core elements: your WooCommerce store, a structured product feed, and your Merchant Center account, which acts as the system Google uses to validate and distribute your product data.

After verifying your website, adding business details, and configuring shipping and tax settings, you can upload your feed and make your products eligible to appear on Google Shopping.

In short: create a feed → submit it to Merchant Center → meet Google’s requirements → and your products can start appearing on Google Shopping (for free or via ads).

In this guide, you’ll learn exactly how to sell on Google Shopping step by step using WooCommerce.

What is Google Shopping (Quick Overview)

Google Shopping is a product discovery platform where users can search, compare, and find products from different online stores. Your products can appear across Google properties like Search, Shopping tab, and Images.

There are two ways your products appear:

• Free listings – Also known as organic listings. No cost, visibility depends on product data quality.
• Paid listings (ads) – Also known as product listing ads or Google Shopping product ads.

What You Need Before Selling on Google Shopping

Before you start, make sure you have the following:

• A WooCommerce store with published products
• A Google Merchant Center account
• A product feed with required attributes (title, price, image, GTIN, etc.)
• A verified website with shipping, tax, and return policies set up
• (Optional) A Google Ads account for running paid campaigns

How to sell on Google Shopping

Here’s how to start selling on Google Shopping process works –

• Product feed – If you have an eCommerce store and have a well-built system of proven sales channels with a decent number of products or regularly make changes to your products, you must create and submit a product feed file. This file includes all your product details.
• Google Merchant Center – Google Shopping is a search engine and doesn’t have a product management panel of its own. Google Merchant Center is the platform that manages product listings and distribution for Google. It’s free to open and requires you to go through some basic and advanced steps in two stages.
• Connecting WooCommerce to Google Merchant Center – To add your products to Google Shopping, you need to connect your Woo store to GMC (Google Merchant Center) and complete a series of steps to confirm you are a valid online store.
• Uploading product feed – Once you have done all of the above, you can then upload your product feed to GMC. GMC will then create product pages for your products and distribute them on Google platforms, including Google Shopping.
• Creating Google Shopping ads – You need to connect that GMC account to a Google Ads account to create Google Shopping ads.

This was your answer to how to list my products on Google Shopping and How to sell on Google Shopping. Let us now explain every step in detail.

Creating a Google Merchant Center account

The product feed is the most important element of this entire process. Therefore, we will cover that later in detail.

Let’s start with the easiest task: Creating a Google Merchant Center (GMC) account. Go to GMC’s official domain and sign up or log in with a Gmail address.

The Gmail ID should be your official or regular-use email ID because you will need this same Gmail to create a Google Ads account as well.Right after you input your Gmail and set a secure password, the platform will ask some basic questions

The next screen will ask you whether you want to lead your audience to your WooCommerce website or to your brick-and-mortar store.

We have already mentioned that Google Shopping allows offline store owners to list their products on the platform as well. When a user clicks the title of those product listings, they will be redirected to the store’s map location (Google Maps).

The first option is for you as a WooCommerce store. It will redirect the users to your product pages.

Buy on Google Checkout experience update

The middle option you saw in the above screenshot refers to the Buy on Google Checkout experience. Through this option, shop owners/retailers in the USA and France were able to directly sell on Google Shopping.

Shoppers were able to check out directly on Google Shopping without visiting the store. Retailers like you could use this feature without any monthly or other fees.

The platform allowed you to integrate third-party payment gateways of your choice and receive payments. This Buy Now button was available for SERP, Google Shopping, and YouTube.

However, Google officially ended the Buy on Google service in October 2023.

Instead of this service, Google has introduced a more streamlined checkout experience that takes your customers directly to your checkout flow. It automatically adds the products to your store’s cart and leads them to checkout quickly, saving them from the multistep checkout process.

In the final GMC account setup window, you can select your platform and sign up for their newsletter. You will receive a confirmation email, and after account verification is complete, you can proceed to the next steps.

We must mention that GMC has a new version called Google Merchant Center Next. They are slowly rolling out the new version to new users. You may get redirected to the new user interface after signing up.

How to sell on Google Shopping: Setting up Free product listing on GMC

Here’s the list of steps you need to complete for GMC to distribute and showcase your products.

Step 1 – Input your WooCommerce store business details

Enter your business address, location, and phone number in this tab.

Step 2 – Verify your WooCommerce website

This is a crucial step. Before you learn or implement how to sell on Google Shopping, you need to confirm with GMC that you have a valid online store and that you are the owner of the website.

Start by entering your website URL in the following box.

Now comes the technical part. GMC offers several ways to verify your website.

1. If you have a custom-made eCommerce website, you can get a code in your email and place it in your header section.
2. If you are using a hosted eCommerce platform, for example, WordPress.com, you can verify by following the instructions.
3. If you have access to your hosting server, you can add a meta tag under your <head> tag or upload an HTML file to verify.
4. You can also verify through Google Tag Manager.

We assume you have developed your own WordPress WooCommerce website on a hosting server. In that case, you will have to pick the Add an HTML or File option.

Option 1 – Adding an HTML tag to the header

Copy the given code and log into your WordPress admin panel. Go to Appearance>>Theme Editor and then find the file named Header or Theme Header (header.php).

Paste the code within <head> </head> tags as you can see below.

Update the header.php file, come back to GMC, and hit the verify button.

Option 2 – Upload an HTML file to your server

If you have access to your hosting server control panel, you can access your file server and upload the given file. After that, click the verify button on Google Merchant Center.

Once you are done, GMC will display a similar screen.

Step 3 – Adding Shipping, Tax and Return policies

You can set your Shipping, sales tax, and return policies according to what you have set on your WooCommerce store.

Step 4 – Adding products to Google Merchant Center

This step is your answer to how to add products to Google Shopping. First, you need to decide whether you want to add products one by one or in bulk. As a WooCommerce store, you must upload products in bulk through a product feed.

GMC offers you multiple ways to add products.

Here’s how it looks in the classic version of GMC.

And here’s how it looks on GMC Next.

Let’s discuss the options.

Connect to WooCommerce

If you’re already using WooCommerce, you can easily link it to your Merchant Center. Your product management stays in WooCommerce, and everything smoothly shows up on Google without any changes to your WooCommerce setup.

However, we would discourage this method, because you can’t control any attributes or add GMC preferred custom attributes to it. As a result, your products may not appear in all expected search results.

Add products from a file

This is the best option for you. You can create a product feed file and connect/upload using this method. We will explain and walk you through this method later in the article.

Use a Google Sheets template

You can choose to create a feed file in Google Sheets.

Simply connect your GMC to your Google Sheets using the “Use Template” button and insert your product details under the template.

GMC Next will automatically update the file according to your set time. However, this method is manual in terms of inserting product details. You need to manually collect your product data and paste them under the attributes.

Add products one by one

If you only have a few products to add, you can fill out a form with all the necessary details about your product. After adding, you can make changes, delete them, or add more whenever you want.

Add products using API

For big inventories or frequent updates, you can use the Content API option. But fair warning – it needs some tech know-how. It lets you schedule updates, so you’re in control of when your changes go live.

Step 5 – Agree to Google Terms & Policies

View and agree to Google’s terms and policies.

Step 6 – How to sell on Google Shopping – Final Review

Google will review your data to verify whether it meets their product data specifications. If not, GMC will recommend you fix the Merchant Center errors you have in your account before they can display your products.

What is a Google Shopping Product Feed?

A product feed is the core element of selling on Google Shopping. It’s a file (XML, CSV, or TXT) that contains all your product information in a structured format.

Google uses this data to:

• Match your products with search queries
• Display accurate product details
• Rank your listings

Better data = better visibility.

You can upload product feed files to different channels such as Amazon, Google Shopping, Facebook, Bing Shopping, Instagram, Idealo, PriceGrabber, eBay, TikTok, Snapchat, etc. When you upload the feeds, these channels will fetch your product details from the file and generate product listings/pages inside their platform.

Thus you can reach a massive audience with minimum effort. You must also create and submit product feed files to generate product ads on different platforms such as Google Shopping, Meta channels, Snapchat dynamic ads, etc.

As a result, you can significantly boost your traffic, conversions, ROAS, and revenue. When it comes to the question of how to add items to Google Shopping or how to sell on Google Shopping, the product feed takes center stage as the essential prerequisite.

Google Shopping Product Feed Requirements

Every channel including Google Merchant Center or Google Shopping has some product feed specifications you need to follow. The channel has some specific guidelines and attribute requirements.

Notice the column headers? These are different characteristics of your products such as prices, descriptions, titles, brands, categories, discount or sale price, availability, etc.

In a product feed, these are known as or called Attributes. Google supports a wide range of attributes, 55 to be exact.

However, not all of them are required. But we must remind you that the more info you provide (attributes), the better chance your products will have to be seen by the right shoppers.

To improve your chances of appearing in search results, include these key attributes:

• Product ID
• Title
• Description
• Product URL
• Image URL
• Price
• Availability
• Brand
• GTIN/MPN
• Condition

Providing complete and accurate data is essential for performance.

How to create a Google product feed

You can create a Google Shopping product feed in several formats such as XML, CSV, TXT, and TSV. As we mentioned earlier, you can use software such as Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, or any code/text editor to create a feed file.

Simply collect the attributes, set them as column headers, and paste your product details under them. However, this manual method can crash your plane, or worse the airports may even reject it to land and overall, it would be a nightmare to manage and fly this thing!

In short, you will need a product feed management tool. The best on the market is CTX Feed, a product feed management plugin for WooCommerce.

Let us quickly explain why it is the best Google Shopping plugin.

• It has a built-in template for Google Shopping that automatically populates all necessary attributes and knows all formatting and guidelines.
• CTX Feed automatically collects and pastes your product data in the feed.
• It has an automatic update feature on set intervals.
• The plugin supports feed connection through URL/SFTP/HTTP/FTP methods.
• Comes packed with all necessary custom fields that can be enabled on a single toggle.
• You can map your website categories with Google’s category structure.
• Allows you to exclude incomplete and out-of-stock products from the feed automatically applying filters.

Overall, CTX Feed automates the feed generation, connection, and update process to streamline your tasks.

How to create a product feed using CTX Feed

If you are wondering how to sell on Google Shopping, CTX Feed has the majority of the tasks covered for you. The plugin is the most popular in the WordPress plugin repository.

However, we recommend the CTX Feed pro version for optimal results.

Let’s first install the plugin and go to settings.

Click on the Custom Fields tab and enable the necessary custom attributes.

MPN, GTIN, and Brand attributes are some of the most essential attributes of a Google product feed. But, unfortunately, WooCommerce doesn’t have these fields on its product pages.

Adding custom fields through a plugin or coding is a complex task. CTX Feed saves you from that hassle as you can see.

Now, you can go to your product pages and find the custom fields under the Product Data >> Inventory tab. Input your value so that CTX Feed can automatically collect this data when creating a feed.

To add brands you can either create from individual product pages or go to Products>>Brands by CTX Feed menu.

Finally, assign the brand from product pages.

Another task we want to do before we get into feed generation is mapping categories.

Click to create a new category mapping attribute.

Select your merchant.

Finally, map your existing WooCommerce website categories to Google categories.

This gives you better chances to appear in relevant searches. Let’s create the feed now.

Select your channel from the dropdown.

CTX Feed will automatically populate necessary fields.

For Google Categories, make sure you select your custom attribute.

Hit the generate button to create your feed.

Here are the filter options if you are using the pro version.

Find your feed file on the Manage Feeds page. This page also lets you set automatic updates.

Here are the available feed file settings.

How to create a product feed using CTX Feed: Video Tutorial

How to sell on Google Shopping – Uploading or Connecting the product feed

Coming back to step 4 – adding products to Google Merchant Center. Let us walk you through the classic GMC version first. Select the multiple options.

Next, select your target country, language, and checkmark where you want to showcase your products (free listings, shopping ads, etc.).

Select the Scheduled Fetch option. This option allows you to connect your feed through a URL.

Enter your feed link and set automatic GMC update frequency.

This update frequency works parallelly with CTX Feed’s update features and always keeps your data across the platforms accurate and updated.

Hit Fetch Now for GMC to collect your product data immediately.

After successful upload, it will display the available products.

If you are using GMC Next then select the Add Products from a File option.

Paste your Google Shopping product feed link and set your update fetch frequency.

Click continue and GMC will upload your products from the connected feed link. The best thing about CTX Feed is the plugin already knows what Google requires and generates feeds according to that without you worrying about it.

As a result, you will probably never encounter rejection issues or errors if you follow the simple steps above. Along with free listings, you can connect your GMC to a Google Ads account and create product listing ads through shopping campaigns.

Frequently Ask Questions about selling on Google Shopping

Selling on Google Shopping can seem like a lot of moving parts, so here’s a breakdown of the most common questions retailers have when getting started.

Wrap up

This was our answer on how to sell on Google Shopping. I hope this article will guide you to list your products on Google Shopping and grow your online shop business manifold.