Merchant Center

Google added a new promotion targeting option to Google Merchant Center for audience targeting. The option is labeled “preferred audience” and is available when setting up a promotion.

Google added a new navigation button to Google Merchant Center labeled “Creative Content.” I believe this is where you access Product Studio, and all your videos and assets for your…

Google added a new promotion method in Google Merchant Center for Top-performing products. This lets you just promote your best performing products in Google Shopping and Google Search.

Did you know that Google Merchant Center will automatically crop your product images in Google Shopping if it thinks it will look better in Google Search? Did you know that…

Google seems to have added a download option to the Google Merchant Center promotions section. when creating promotions in Google Merchant Center, the download button will be on the bottom…

Google Merchant Center Next added new analytics data to the Promotions tab/section. This shows you two new analytics charts including “Your promotions at a glance” and “Performance in the last…

Google Merchant Center now lets some merchants and advertisers define an audience for a promotion. This allows you to restrict who sees the promotion in Google Search for your Merchant…

It looks like Google is launching a special agency version of Google Merchant Center named Merchant Center for Agencies. Google explained this version is a “tailored experience designed specifically for…

Google has updated its Google Merchant Center policies to now allow for the sale of physical goods subscriptions. Google said this “will be available to all eligible Shopping ad merchants…

Google has updated its Misrepresentation policy for both Shopping ads and free listings within Google Merchant Center. Google said the “update provides additional examples of what the policy covers, more…

Google has added a new promotion option to Google Merchant Center. The new option is Google Wallet. Google doesn’t detail what this promotion does but it likely lets you promote…

Google updated the wording in the title documentation for Merchant Center, now suggesting you can use your own brand or company name in the short title of your products. That…

Google has rolled out the new, more compact, menu bar for Google Merchant Center Next. This was part of a slew of user interface updates that Google has been slowly…

Google is testing a new way to lift a suspension within Google Merchant Center. Some can now do video verification, the same way they can with verifying their Google Business…

Google has updated the Google Merchant Center pricing policies for September. The changes include updates in the merchant fees, government charges, import and export costs, regional and installment pricing, price…

After seeing the loyalty pricing and discounts in the Google search results and shopping ads, Google has now announced that they have new loyalty offerings in Merchant Center and also…

Google Merchant Center now lets you preview your promotions, your sponsored ads, before adding them. Google also added two check boxes to your customer service section for live versus chatbot…

Google is adding the Product Studio tab to the left side bar of Google Merchant Center for some merchants. Beforehand, it was within the Products tab, as a feature in…

Google Merchant Center is rolling out automatic shipping updates under the automatic improvements tab. “Automatic shipping updates improve the accuracy of shipping information of your products. The feature can help…

Google appears to be reintroducing the “product status change” report within Google Merchant Center. This displays the historical changes of your product statuses and is a feature that was greatly…

Google has rolled out a new feature to automate the process of updating your inventory with Google Merchant Center. It is called Website-reported Autofeeds and it uses Google Tag Manager…

Google has made some more minor changes to the Google Merchant Center user interface. Specifically, Google moved where the merchants access settings section is and also updated the sidebar with…

Google announced it will be removing the notifications and email archive section from Google Merchant Center into Google Merchant Center Next on June 25, 2025. After June 25th, Google Merchant…

Google has updated its title structured data help document for Google Merchant Center to now recommend you add the product’s brand name to the title of the product when it’s…

Google has a “new feature,” as it labeled it, within Google Merchant Center, for event promotions. This allows you to promote an event, such as a sale, promotion or occasion,…

Google added a new way to search for your products in the Google Merchant Center console. There is a new search button named “Search for Products” that you can click…

Google updated its Google Merchant Center merchant listing structured data documentation to removed the EnergyConsumptionDetails properties and added an alternative solution to the certificationIdentification property. But keep in mind that…

Google Merchant Center has added a new report named popular products report. This report will show you your popular products, popular brands, top-selling products, etc, all on Google.

Google has made a number of updates to its Merchant Center product data specifications, including some that went into effect on April 8th and some that will go into effect…

Google will change how it counts clicks in Google Merchant Center starting April 21, 2025. This change will make clicks count the same way Google Ads counts clicks. This means…

Google Ads has confirmed that it has lost some conversion data for some advertisers who used Google Merchant Center in February. The data is not coming back, it is unrecoverable….

Google added returnPolicyCountry to the return policy code examples within the Google Merchant Center structured data document. This is because Google requires returnPolicyCountry for MerchantReturnPolicy.

Google Merchant Center has apparently added the ability to dispute and/or request a review in bulk. This does not work for all notices but it works for some and it…

Google has made a number of updates to the product analytics section within Google Merchant Center Next. Organic conversions have been renamed to Purchases. Plus, Google lets you specify it’s…

Retailers have been complaining for the past several days that there is a bug in Google Merchant Center when trying to add the shipping rates and costs. Step four of…

Google seems to have added, for some merchants, a new section named Physical Stores to the Google Merchant Center Next console. In this section is random data from within the…

Google Merchant Center recently began showing AI-generated summaries for how well your performance is doing with Merchant Center in Google Search. These are labeled as “experimental” and “AI-generated.”

Google has relaxed its inconsistent language policy within Google Merchant Center to allow some languages between your product feed and your website language not to match. Google wrote, “we are…

Google has posted a new help section for Google Merchant Center, a Merchant Center Next Glossary. This glossary defines key Merchant Center terms and links you to related articles with…

Google Merchant Center added a new field in the “Promotion conditions” section for “first order” discount. This seems to be for shopping ads set up in Merchant Center.

Google has posted a new help document in the Google Merchant Center help center documenting the annotations and badges available both in free and paid Google Shopping results. Google wrote,…

Google Analytics added Merchant Center recommendations directly to the recommendations section within Google Analytics. Google said these recommendations will “alert you to issues preventing your products from being approved in…

Google sent emails to some Google Merchant Center advertisers and free users about a new feature in Chrome where the Google web browser will showcase your promotions directly in the…

Google has added a new promotion type to Google Merchant Center named “Sale events.” Sale events are a type data that you can submit on Google and are shown on…

Google is testing new Audience Insights or audience analytics within the Google Merchant Center interface. This can show you your audience’s regions, ages, gender, age group and more.

Google Merchant Center now lets you name your various shipping policies. This is a welcomed change because previously, it was hard to know which shipping policy was associated with which…

Google has added two new verification methods for merchants/retailers within Google Merchant Center next. The new methods are to verify via a business email or verify via an e-commerce/shopping platform.

Google announced two new features for Google Merchant Center (1) Video generation in Product Studio and (2) Amazon MCF integration with Merchant Center.

This week, the Google August 2024 core update finished rolling out, a bit earlier than expected. There is still search volatility, a lot of it…

Google published an internal interview on its Search Off the Record podcast with John Mueller and Lizzi Sassman (who you know) and Irina Tuduce from the Google Shopping team. Irina…

Google will automatically link Google Ads and Google Merchant Center accounts by October 3, 2024. Google emailed some advertisers who have yet to link those accounts about the change.

Google announced that all merchants will be migrated (or as Google put it “upgrading”) from the old Google Merchant Center to Google Merchant Center Next by September (next month). We…

Over the past couple of weeks, there has been an increase in complaints around Google Search listing URLs with the srsltid URL parameter tagged along to the URL, as the…

Google Merchant Center may have recently added to the product feed report the number of products found by Google, not by way of a feed you provided or manually submitted…

Google has a new Google Ads feature within Google Merchant Center feeds in AI image editor that enables you to import product images from your Merchant Center feeds into your…

Google Merchant Center Next now finally supports supplemental feed/source support. Google promised us this would come early this year, but it didn’t happen until early Q3 of 2024. That being…

Google announced that Google Merchant Center Next, the updated version of Google Merchant Center it announced at Google Marketing Live in 2023, is now coming to all merchants this month….

A couple of years ago, I reported that Google has changed how your feeds work in Merchant Center for countries by removing the need to list a primary country and…

Google sent out notices via email to Google Merchant Center merchants about a change to how Google collects and uses conversion data that you share with Google. Google said it…

Google Merchant Center seems to be testing a whole slew of new analytics for the Merchant Center console. The data itself is not new but the UX is, and I…

Google has published its yearly update for its Merchant Center product data specification. Some of the changes listed below went into effect yesterday, April 9, while some go into effect…

Google Merchant Center has added new themed templates to the Product Studio. The new theme was for St. Patrick’s Day, which is coming up this Sunday. But Google will soon…

Google will change how it estimates its delivery times through Google Merchant Center. Starting on April 9, Google will look at minimum [min_handling_time]and maximum [max_handling_time] attributes for processing time in…

Google has posted a new policy for Google Merchant Center around using AI-generated images. In short, you need to make sure those images have meta data that labels the image…

Google has updated its policy where an identifier exists issue will no longer lead to disapproval of your product listings. Instead, Google will first issue you a warning for identifier…

Google Merchant Center is beta testing a new score card to help merchants understand how their browsing experience score is doing. This card is called “Browsing Experience” and it shows…

Google has confirmed that it will begin supporting rules & supplemental feeds in early next year for Google Merchant Center Next. Google added that all existing rules will continue to…

Google Merchant Center has been automatically creating and applying promotions to some of your products over the Black Friday holiday season. The truth is, Google has been doing this for…

Google has updated its various abuse policies for Merchant Center. Google said Google Shopping ads and Google free listings Malicious or unwanted software policy will be split into three separate…

Google Merchant Center Next, its upgraded version of its Merchant Center platform, reportedly just gained integration with Google Business Profiles. Emmanuel Flossie reported, “Google Merchant Center Next now allows you…

We got another official Google ranking update, the September 2023 helpful content update. This week, we had our first post-Google core update tremors and fluctuations. After saying they would a…

Google Merchant Center has added a new attribute named checkout_link_template. Including this new attribute lets you include a checkout URL in your product data which gives online shoppers the option…

Google announced that Google Search Console will now show Google Merchant Center visibility issues and changes in new reports. There are two new reports, the first report shows when products…

Google has a new 3D model link [virtual_model_link] attribute, or at least new documentation on the 3D model link [virtual_model_link] attribute. This lets you provide 3D and/or AR models of…

Google Merchant Center can now issue warnings for “inappropriate titles.” This can happen for your Google Discover or Demand Gen ads within Google Merchant Center.

Google has posted a new policy saying AI-generated reviews are against its policies, disallowed and considered spam. If you find such content, Google said you must mark it as spam…

Google wants you to add your customer support details to Google Merchant Center Next. Google said, “Shoppers are often dissatisfied when they can’t easily find customer support and returns related…

Google Merchant Center is rolling out a new feature named “collections.” Collections let you group up to 100 products together in the same collection. Google said collections, “Collections allow you…

Google has posted a new document in the Google Merchant Center area on how to build trust with your customers. The document goes through your business identity, your transparency, your…

Google Merchant Center seems to be rolling out its old beta feature named automated discounts. Automated discounts helps retailers automatically discount their product prices based on multiple real-time signals, Google…

I am hearing reports of issues with Google Merchant Center, specifically DNS issues, timeout issues, 404 issues and other crawl issues being reported by Merchant Center when there are no…

Google has done its yearly update for its Merchant Center product data specification. Some of the changes listed below went into effect yesterday, some go into effect July 18, 2023…

Google is sending out emails to some on Google Merchant Center asking them if they want to beta test a new call-to-action button to send searchers who are ready to…

Google announced Google Merchant Center Next, a more lightweight, easier-to-use version of Google Merchant Center at Google Marketing Live. Google added, “while we’re simplifying, the features that larger retailers rely…

Google has posted that the Google Merchant Center feeds have issues. The notice is posted here and reads, “We’re investigating reports of an issue with Feeds. We will provide more…

Google now can show you a Merchant Center with Google Business Profile status dashboard in the search results. This is similar to how Google shows your local business profile in…

Google posted an updated policy update in the Google Merchant Center section for a new “linked account suspension.” In short, this impacts a suspended Google Ads account linked to your…

I am hearing some reports that Google is testing a new user interface for the Google Merchant Center. The new interface is not just some design changes but an overhaul…

Google has made changes to how your feeds work for countries, removing the need to list a primary country and additional countries, and replacing them with target countries.

Google has updated its Google Merchant Center policy for free listings only specific to the “Insufficient contact information” or the “Missing return and refund policy.” Free listings will no longer…

Google has updated its Google Merchant Center policy to no longer disapprove the login required and restricted purchase free listings. Google said instead, Google will mark them as active but…

Two years ago, Google made a new Google Merchant Center policy named Website needs improvement. Well, now free listings accounts with this issue status are still active, but their products…

Earlier this year, Google Merchant Center added auto-tagging for free listings is now available in your Merchant Center account. But this only worked in the Google Shopping tab, now it…

We covered this news back in April, but as Kirk Williams posted last week, some of you may have forgotten. In short, Google Merchant Center will automatically opted everyone in…

The folks at WhiteSpark showed screenshots of Google Business Profile limiting the control you have over your product listings within your local panel. They showed how “businesses can no longer…

Annually, Google updates the Merchant Center product data specification and Google made some updates to it last night. Some updates went into place on April 27, 2022 and some go…

Some are saying they now see under the Google Analytics 4 property settings where it lets you link Google Analytics with other Google products – an option to link with…

Google seems to be testing a form of messaging between businesses and merchants that use Google Merchant Center. Google said in an email to some Google Merchants that it is…