Onboard as a point of sale or inventory data provider

This process only needs to happen once per point of sale (POS) or inventory data provider (not every time you onboard a retailer).

To onboard as a point of sale (POS) or inventory data provider, you need to set up:

• Merchant Center (MC): Add store sales and inventory data
• Merchant Center Multi Client Account (MCA): it’s recommended to use a MCA structure with a sub-account for each retailer.

To onboard as a POS or inventory data provider, follow these steps:

Create a Merchant Center account.

Create an inventory or sales data source and an optional store data source:

1. Click the settings and tools icon and click Data sources.
2. Click Add product source.
3. Create relevant data sources and configure the appropriate settings for each data source:
   • POS sales data source
   • POS inventory data source
   • POS store data source

Note: In order to implement the local data source partnership program, you're required to upload either an inventory data source or a sales data source. You can also upload both data sources and use them in combination.

Upload product data to your Merchant Center account via SFTP or Google Cloud Storage using the specifications as defined in the data spec.

If you manage multiple merchants, we recommend using Content API for Shopping with POS API. To be enabled to send data on behalf of your merchants, get in touch with your Google Business Partner.

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Review product data processing results

You can review the results of all product data processing for file-based or Google Sheet-based data sources. To find the results:

In your Merchant Center, click the settings and tools icon and click Data sources.

Click the POS data source you’d like to review.

Review the results:

• Properties: This includes key data source properties, which vary depending on the input method of the data source. Here, you can find attributes such as input method, time zone, file size, detected delimiter (if applicable), and more.
• Attributes: Depending on which Merchant Center program your product data is opted into, we require attributes to adhere to the product data specification. In this section, you can review the attributes which are recognized and mapped, and also unrecognized attributes which don’t match any of the listed attributes in the product data specification. You can use tools, such as Attribute Rules, to tell Merchant Center which unrecognized attribute you’d like to use to populate a Google attribute. For example, you may want to use "product name" in the "title" attribute.
• Processing data: In this section, you can review the amount of items found in your product data as well as those with any detected item issues. Review the list of item issues to understand how many items in your product data are impacted, including examples and links to documentation to address the issue.