:spreadshop: The Product Feed-Thread

Just post all questions / comments / feedback / tutorials here about using our product feeds!

We’ll try to sort you out with @Lena_Spreadshirt and especially @Thomas_Spreadshirt :wink:

This is good. A separate thread for product feed.

@Thomas_Spreadshirt , I am sorry I didn’t reply to your replies in the thread Product feed submitted to Google Shopping Ads says Insufficienct product identifiers that i opened and @Sara took the opportunity to close that thread. :grinning: I was gone for a retreat in the mountains. Anyways, I am back and I have things to say.

@Thomas_Spreadshirt, you said:
Insufficient product indentifiers (GTIN, MPN, Brand) are currently within scope for the next fix.
Invalid or missing recommended attributes like age group are doable and we will work on that.

Thanks to you that you will be working on these.

And regarding the size attribute missing, you said it will make the feed very big.

Anyways, here’s my story again as this is a new thread. I am posting a screenshot of my Google Merchant Center account.

I submitted 1463 products to Google Merchant center.

I deleted all the non clothing items before uploading because Google requires two out of three attributes GTIN or mpn, brand for non clothing items.

I added <g:age_group>adult</g:age_group> to the remaining clothing items in my feed, as i sell adult clothing only because Gooogle requires age attribute for clothing items.

Google also requires size attribute for Clothing items submitted to USA and a few other countries. Otherwise, the merchant center throws errors, not warnings. You can neglect the warnings not the errors, because these are required attributes. So, this needs to be fixed. Thomas, you posted a screenshot of your products feed that showed some approved products despite missing the size attribute. I wonder which country did you submit your feed to. All of my products threw errors, not a single one got accepted. You also said the feed will be very big in size if you incorporate the size attribute in the feed. Well, Google Merchant Center can easily handle that big a feed. Anyways, if you don’t want to make the feed big, here’s a solution I propose: Add Size: medium attribute to all products and change all the product links by appending ?size=3 in the link and not add other sizes in the feed. You have a point when you said very less people search for size in google.

@Thomas_Spreadshirt, I also want to know the url you submitted to Google Merchant center as your shop’s URL. Did you submit your custom domain or spreadshirt’s domain. I had to change the url of all my products from spreadshirt’s domain to my custom domain before submitting because there’s no way to verify spreadshirt’s domain as mine. Spreadshops are not on subdomains, so i guess cannot be verified inside the Merchant account. Because of this, everytime you guys update the product feed, i would need to manually make changes and again upload the feed to Google Merchant Center. It would be amazing if I can link https://shop.spreadshirt.com/headyourmind/products.rss to Google Merchant Center.

My shop is at: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/headyourmind/ and my custom domain is https://headyourmind.com

If you guys don’t come up with a fix, I am going to change my feed to include size medium for all my clothing products and submit to Google Merchant Center. That way, I would be able to get all my clothing products approved. For non clothing items, i will have to depend on your guys to include GTIN and MPN, brand in the products. I cannot do that myself.

P.S. - Neglect the Shipping errors in the Google Merchant Center Screenshot. I have not setup shipping information in my account as yet.

Chirayu

Just to let you know, as caps have <g:google_product_category>173</g:google_product_category> set, they don’t seem to require the size attribute. Hence only 1439 products out of 1463 show missing size attribute errors. Once I enter the shipping information at Google Merchat center, I think i will be able to get all the caps and beanies (24 of them including all possible color combinations) approved at Google Merchant Center.

Thanks Chirayu for the very valuable discussion.
I´ll try to follow step by step.

This would only work for Adult Products, as you wrote. Kids clothes are coming with age groups.
So your solution is clever but I am not sure how to tackle this from our side. I´ll need to discuss this with an expert.

I use the feed URL from the Shop Admin that goes like this shop.spreadshirt.de/xxxxxx/products.rss as I am on a germain domain.

Verifying your shop is an easy thing, but I guess you haven’t found the form field yet.

  1. Please go to your Shop Admin> Shop Name & Info > Shop Name & SEO Data.
  2. Copy your Shop URL and go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home
  3. Set up a new property within Google’s Search Console
  4. Click the Tab “Alternate Methods” and check the “HTML Tag” radio button
  5. Copy the meta tag
  6. paste only the verification ID (without quotation marks)into your Shop admin and Save
  7. now it´ll take up to 1hr until the cache has reloaded and you can manually verify your URL in the Search Console :space_invader:


20

Here´s a help page from us… unfortunately with broken image links. :grimacing:

1 Like

Hey @Thomas_Spreadshirt,
I just checked my product feed. And I can see the mpn and age group attribute added to the products. Thanks for doing these so fast.
Also thanks for the guide to verify my Spreadshop at Google Merchant Center. I tried doing it and i realized that - to advertise in all the countries i sell, i will need a multi client merchant center account and to start the process, i need to email google. So,I think i am good with using my domain for now. This way i can submit feeds for almost all countries i sell in and tie them with my adwords account.
Now regarding the size attribute, here’s a link to google merchant center help https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324492?hl=en that says:

Size Attribute
Required for all products that vary by size
Required for Apparel & Accessories > Clothing (1604) and Apparel & Accessories > Shoes (187) products when targeting these countries:

Brazil
France
Germany
Japan
United Kingdom
United States

I checked my feed and realized only the hoodies have this google product id. So my guess is now after you guys have added the mpn attribute, all products submitted will be accepted except for the hoodies which is cool considering it’s summer. I am submitting the updated feed to google merchant center, the only change i’ve made is i have changed the shop’s url to my custom domain. I’ll let you guys know how it goes.

Chirayu

1 Like

@Thomas_Spreadshirt,

I submitted the new product feed to the Merchant Center. Unfortunately, all the clothing products still show Missing required attribute: size. Note again, these are errors, not warnings and hence need to be fixed before you can show your ads on Google Shopping Ads.

I am still not getting how you were able to get your products without the size attribute approved at the Google Merchant Center.

The good thing is the feed is good to go for countries other than

Brazil
France
Germany
Japan
United Kingdom
United States

Do you have any plans to add the size attribute in the near future? You said doing so will make the feed big. Sure it will but Google can handle feeds upto 4GB in size, so that’s not a problem at all. Anyways you can just add one size variant and escape the rest. Without the size attribute, the feed cannot be used to display Google Shopping Ads in one of the biggest market in the world, the US and I really hope you guys can come up with a solution.

One more suggestion, why not include the design description alongside the product description in the <g:description> attribute?

Chirayu

@Thomas_Spreadshirt, Anything new that has come to light?

Hey Chirayu,

you can leave the size-warning aside and work with the data.
I have set up several adverts (Shopping Ads & Search Network) and got them running.
E.g. my feed consists of 1.100 articles from T-Shirts, hoodies, some pillows to some mugs.
896 of them come with a size warning.
But:
by looking at the detailed list of products it shows that only a very few are limited for Shopping Ads
34

or for Remarketing purposes:

13

What I get out of this is (but feel free to correct me) that google brings up those errors, but does not block all your products by default for Shopping Ads.
Here´s my guess:
If your products come with a size warning then they will be distributed in the google search like this:

But not within the “Shopping” Tab of google, where articles need ot be filterable for sizes etc

For the “problem” of having several shipping countries, I thought a subfeed for any currency/language should be fine too.
But I am not a pro on here, so I´d say stick to google´s terms of service

Hello again @Thomas_Spreadshirt,
I checked my merchant center account today and found out indeed few products are finally active. Sadly all my active products are caps, mugs and totes. Not a single tshirt or hoodie or cinch bag is active. Infact now, the count of warnings have increased. I have included a screenshot of the errors and warnings.

The new warning that the item requires gtin is appearing for cinch bags and Fruit of the Loom Men’s tshirts. As far as i understand this is happening because there must be other advertisers on google who have submitted gtin values for the fruit of the loom tshirts. Women’ Fruit of the Loom T-Shirts does not show these warnings because the feed mentions <g:brand>Fruit of Loom or Gildan</g:brand>. Due to this Google thinks the brand is “Fruit of Loom or Gildan” as a whole. That’s not a good way to submit brand attribute either.

I really think you should get the feed issue sorted out. There are a lot of things missing and even those that are there are not formed in a nice way - eg the brand name for Women’s Fruit of the Loom T-shirt. Google does not read “or” in the attribute . Cmon guys, it should not be that difficult to form a proper rss feed given you have all the required info.

Rather than submitting invalid values, simply submit an identifier_exists attribute with a value of FALSE for all such items. Then, do no submit any gtin, mpn, or brand values for the item – leave the values empty. Source: https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Google-Shopping-and-Merchant/What-to-do-if-product-does-not-have-UPC-MPN-or-GTIN/td-p/377505

Chirayu

Today we released a new version of the product feed. It fixes a bug that caused the Merchant Center to reject articles because of a missing GTIN.
:+1:
I recommend uploading your feed again to Google Merchant Center and wait until all products are finally processed. You should not experience any critical GTIN related error messages - marked in red -

best regards,
Thomas

1 Like

Hi Thomas;

Chirayu is right.

For the USA, the Google Merchant Center requires the size attribute or they will not allow products like T-shirts, Sweatshirts or Hoodies to be available in Google Shopping Ads (Why this is a requirement in the USA, I don’t know).

I know have 5200+ products in the feed and 4800+ have been disqualified for use in Google Shopping Ads since there is no size attribute associated with the product.

I’m adding new designs several times a week and this number is only going to grow and I have no means of getting my designs out there effectively in the biggest buying market on the planet.

Google says it clear:
[…]When you use this attribute, your ad can appear in results that are filtered by size. […]

I think this is the most important sentence. It may be useful when a user is adding a size to his search term. Not having the size attribute included is not a blocker to perform PLAs or Search Network Ads.
Both are still possible.

I am sorry to say, that we won´t include the size attributes. These will cause server response time errors for all partners with bigger assortments.

I understand your issue with server load on your end; but I must re-iterate, that despite that Google statement. In the USA, Google is blocking products in the apparel category from showing up in Shopping Ads.

I’ve included 2 attachments of my backend in the GMC

Hey @xzendor7 !
As of today the product feed supports the “size”-attribute by delivering a default size.
Can you please re-fetch your feed and give us feedback regarding the approval of your items?

1 Like

Ok I just reloaded the rss feed and will see how it goes with the Google Merchant Center.

I’ve been using the feed on Bing (since for them size was not a hard requirement), for a few days and I’m starting to get impressions with it.

It takes a several days before the products make it on to the Bing network and I’ll also let you know how things go with it here as well.

1 Like

The entire feed of 7700+ products was accepted.

Only had a problem with 189 images.

I linked my Google Ads account to my Google Merchant Center account; created my first shopping campaign and the system is now in learning mode.

For Bing Product Ads; I’ve started to receive clicks.

The new size integration has also removed the Size Warning Error.

All I have to do now is find out why some of my typography and artwork are being categorized as adult or gambling when there are no such products in the store or my site for that matter.

Thank for all your help Thomas.

Will keep you updated as events unfold.

2 Likes

grafik

Since you can’t add keywords/keyphrase except for Negative keywords on the Bing and Google shopping Ad platforms; I’m reworking my titles for new design launches to include the Info into the title and body with target keyphrases.

This I hope will allow for Google Shopping Ads and Bing Product Ads an easier time on what the products in my feed are about so that the products can be displayed for the most relevant searches on these search platforms,

There is one thing I forgot to mention and that is and that is the following warning:

Missing or invalid data [condition] - Affected Items: 4,187

Learn more says “Your item’s landing page is missing microdata for the item’s condition”

Then I use the recommended Structured Data Testing Tool: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool

But no errors pop up when I add one of the sample links into the tool.

Ok. I forwarded this to our DEV Team. They will be working on this and the MPN/GTIN issue soonish!