How to Set Up Product Variations in Google Shopping

Google Shopping is one of the best and dominant platforms to promote your WooCommerce store products.

As a WooCommerce store owner, you must be highly interested in promoting your products on Google Shopping because it will enhance the current performance of your store.

Online stores are a rising industry. People love to shop on online platforms. Various services have made online shopping more convenient for customers. There are lots of services that make the online business more convenient for the store owner too. 

Google Shopping can be beneficial for your WooCommerce store’s growth. In this tutorial, we will share the guide to set up product variations on Google Shopping.

Modern technology has added lots of features to online shopping. Now people can enjoy a similar experience of physical shopping on online platforms. There are still some limitations, but we can hope that those limitations will be eliminated too. 

Google Shopping offers a perfect solution both for the store owners and also the customers.

When a store owner promotes their products on Google Merchant Center for Google Shopping, their products reach millions of customers. It might be impossible for them if they did not use this platform.

We all know about the power of Google as a search engine. Most of the online searches are conducted on Google. This search engine giant can also help online store owners to reach their potential customers. 

When the search term on Google matches your products, Google will suggest the products to your customers.

To ensure the maximum output from this promotional product platform, you must know the best practices. This will help you in the long run and also keep you on the safe side. In a world of ever-rising competition, we must adopt all the best skills and practices to ensure the highest performance for your business. 

Google has specific requirements of how you should submit your products on Google Merchant Center.

If you fail to follow the required guideline, you will receive flags from Google. Flags are not suitable; they will hamper the performance of your product feed. In the worst case, your product feed will be rejected. 

Luckily, removing flags from Google Merchant is not a very difficult task. Moreover, we already have a guide on how to remove flags from Google Merchant Center.

Setting Up Product Variations on Google

To help you with your business, we have prepared many resources that cover a wide range of topics. Here we will teach you how to set up product variations in Google Shopping.

Variable products are standard for online store owners. WooCommerce offers flexible options to deal with variable products. Let’s say you are selling T-shirts in your store. It is common to have the same T-shirt in multiple colors and sizes. 

We are confident that you have a handful of variable products on your WooCommerce store. While promoting the products on Google Shopping, you should also group them just like your WooCommerce store.

Let’s say you have products that come with different colors, sizes, fabrics, and other attributes that customers can choose from. It is better if you group those products on Google Shopping using product variations. 

On the contrary, you can also present each of your product variations as a single product. Still, if you set up variations, it will allow you to group related products under a single listing on Google Shopping.

This is very helpful to give your customers a better shopping experience. They can get all the different variations under the duplicate listing. This makes it easy for them to choose between options and check all the available variations.

It is not very easy to deal with product variations. We will try to clarify this as much as we can. You may get overwhelmed when you want to deal with the variations in product attributes. For example, the color, size, and other attributes.

Luckily, Google Shipping offers an excellent option to deal with this. You can add variations of the same product under a single listing.

To make this work, each of your product groups must have a different Google’s supported variant attribute. 

To communicate the related products with Google and understand that they belong under the duplicate listing, there is a field called item_group_id. You will have to use this item_group_id field to group your products on Google successfully.

It is very straightforward that if you don’t make the group using the item_group_id field, each of your product variations will have a separate listing. This may not seem to be a huge problem, but your customers will have a hard time navigating your products. 

Additionally, they may miss the desired color variation that you have in a separate listing. It is hard to predict customer behavior. So, you must do everything in the best possible way.

You Must know

Before submitting your products on Google Merchant Center, you must be very careful. We have already mentioned the flags. Make sure that you do everything right and there is no error with your product feed submission. 

Here are a few things that you would love to know. First of all, there is a parent-child relationship between the product variations, and you must develop a way to determine this relationship. Google needs to have this information so it can properly process your data. 

Next, you need to take care of the variant attributes. The product variations must have different SKUs with supported variant attributes. 

Additionally, you need to ensure that in the child SKUs there are values for the attributes in your data (at least one). Let’s make this clear with an example. If your product differs in size, then all the child SKUs in the family must value the size.

How to Set the Product Groups

To make the product groups on Google, you will have to use the item_group_id field offered by Google. Google supports multiple attributes. Google uses the item_gruop_id as the ID for the products that include the variations. 

Here is the list of the supported Google Shopping attributes:

• Color
• Size
• Pattern
• Material
• Age group
• Gender

Google has specific requirements for these fields, and you must be careful while configuring them. Here are some of the most critical recommendations:

• First of all, you should use the parent SKU if possible.
• Secondly, take note that this field accepts a maximum of fifty alphanumeric characters.
• You must use a unique item_group_id for each of your variant groups.
• Most importantly, you need to use the same variant attributes for all the products in the same group.
• We have highlighted some of the crucial things you must know, but Google has a comprehensive list of requirements and suggestions. Please visit this link to get to know the requirements in more detail.

Google offers a straightforward way to configure product variations for Google Merchant. Still, there is a lot for you to learn. You must note that setting up the product variations in Google Shopping is essential because it will enhance the customer experience. 

As a result, you can expect better feedback from your customers. If you have further confusion, let’s make it clear with an example.

Example of a Product Variation

Let’s assume that you have several variable products in your WooCommerce store. One of those variable products is a T-shirt that comes in multiple sizes and color variations. 

There are two different sizes: medium and large, and the colors are green and blue. The SKU of the parent product is 311.

The variations will look like the following.

Green medium

Id: 311-M-Green

Item_group_id: 311

Color: Red

Size: Small

Green large‍

Id: 311-L-Green

Item_group_id: 311

Color: Red

Size: Large

Blue medium

Id: 311-M-Blue

Item_group_id: 311

Color: Blue

Size: Medium

Blue large

Id: 311-L-Blue

Item_group_id: 311

Color: Blue

Size: Large

Variant Setup Guide for Google Feed

When it comes to setting up the product listing or the product feed for the Google Merchant center, it can be very challenging if you do not have any prior experience. You must have in-depth knowledge of the guidelines provided by Google.

If you want to set up your product variations correctly, your products must vary with Google’s supported product attributes. We have shared the list of the Google Shopping attributes above. Here is a quick reference of the Google Shopping attributes supported by Google.

• Color
• Size
• Pattern
• Material
• Age group
• Gender

If your products have some attributes that do not fall into Google’s supported shopping data, you will have to follow this guide.

Let’s give you a demo of creating a demo with the color attribute (shopping attribute supported by Google).

First of all, make sure to enter the full-color name instead of using just a single letter to represent your color. You have to include Green instead of the letter G. Secondly; please ensure that you don’t submit something that does not match your website. 

There should be perfect harmony between the data on your product feed and your website. Moreover, if a product has multiple colors, you can define the primary and secondary colors with a “/.”

Here is an example of a ballpoint pen with multiple colors.

Green ballpoint pen

title: Smart ballpoint – Green

id: 332-GR

color: green

item_group_id: 332

Black ballpoint pen

title: Smart ballpoint – Black

id: 332-BL

color: black

item_group_id: 332

If you are eager to learn more about each of those attributes, please visit the resource compiled by Google: Color, Size, Pattern, Material, Age group, Gender.

Set Up Product Variations in Google Shopping with CTX Feed

Would you like to know about a more convenient way! With CTX Feed, you can ignore all the technicalities and create the most optimized product feeds. It is the best product feed generation and management plugin for WooCommerce. 

We will not go into how you can create a product feed for Google Shopping here because we have already covered the topic here.

The premium version of CTX Feed, known as CTX Feed PRO, offers more options to deal with your product variations. You can choose between three different options to include your product variations. 

You can either select only the variable product, only the product variations, or a combination of both the variable product and product variations.

Next comes the option to deal with the price. You also have three options here. You can either select and show the first variation price, the minimum price, or the maximum price of your product variations. 

Finally, there is an option to set the quantity. There are four options here. You can choose to display the first variation quantity, minimum variation quantity, maximum variation quantity, and the sum of variation quantity.

CTX Feed PRO comes with lots of powerful features and filtering options. With its outstanding features, you can secure more revenue from your WooCommerce store. Learn more about the premium features from here.

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