Books Help

Google Books preview pages include links to online retailers where readers can buy the book. If you'd like to include your store in the list of sellers, you will need to submit availability data to Google Merchant Center. This page describes how to set up an account and submit your data through Google Merchant Center. Please also check whether you're located in a country where you'll need to take the additional step of contacting us.

Set up a Google Merchant Center account

1. Sign up for an account at google.com/merchants.
2. Enter your account information on the Settings page.

Format availability data

There are two ways to provide data on the books you sell: using data feeds or the API.

Data feeds

Create a data feed in one of the following formats:

• Tab-delimited
• RSS 2.0
• Atom 1.0

Please see the required and recommended attributes section below for the attributes to be included in data feeds.

Register your data feed

1. Click the New Data Feed button on the Feeds page to create a new data feed. You can create up to 10 feeds with 100,000 items in each feed.
2. Select an appropriate target country for your feed. (Note: If you don't see your country in the menu, please contact us.)
3. Specify the filename of your feed. This filename must match the filename of the feed which you've created.

Submit your data feed

You have several options for submitting your data feed through Google Merchant Center:

• Direct upload through the Google Merchant Center dashboard (files under 20 MB in size)
• File Transfer Protocol (FTP) (files under 1 GB in size)
• Automatic upload via scheduled fetch (files under 1 GB in size)

API (Advanced)

Please see our detailed instructions for uploading data via API. Follow the instructions in the Getting Started Guide to create your data. Please also see the required and recommended attributes section below.

Required and recommended attributes

When creating your data, you will need to provide information about your items in the form of attributes. Please make sure that you are including all of the following required attributes for each item.

Required attributes

• id - A unique alphanumeric identifier for the book.
• title
• description
• link - The URL of the webpage where the book can be purchased.
• price - The price of the book excluding sales taxes or shipping costs.
• image_link - The URL of a full-sized image of the book.
• condition - Enter used or new.
• gtin - ISBN of the book, either in ISBN10 or ISBN13 format, without hyphens.
• availability - If the item isn't currently available, indicate out of stock. A purchase link to your site will not appear for these books. Otherwise, enter in stock.
• google_product_category - e.g., Media > Books > Fiction > Literature

Recommended attributes

We encourage you to include as many of these attributes in your data as possible. Although they are optional, they allow us to more accurately match your books to search queries.

• shipping
• tax
• shipping_weight

For more information on the attributes, please see the Google Shopping Products Feed Specification.

Additional resources

If you have additional questions about Google Merchant Center, you can find the answers to frequently asked questions at the Google Merchant Center Help Center.