We're excited to announce the full rollout of Merchant Center Next, replacing the classic Merchant Center experience. By September, all retailers will be upgraded to Merchant Center Next, which includes new insights reports, generative AI imagery tools and a more intuitive interface.
Last year, we introduced Merchant Center Next, our simplified platform for businesses to manage how their products show up on Google. Merchant Center Next is easier to use, lets you control how your products appear across Google, and gives you valuable insights about your business, products, and market.
What's new
- Let Product Studio take the pressure off creating content: Product Studio is a go-to tool for AI-powered content creation, helping you create more marketing content with fewer resources. Learn more about Product Studio.
- Review business insights in one place: We’ve made our retail data and analytics tools even easier to use. The new analytics tab includes pricing reports which help you get data-driven pricing insights, competitive visibility tools that help you better understand your position among your competitive set, and retail-specific Search trends that you can compare to your popular products report to help your retail strategies.
- Easily navigate the platform: Merchant Center Next is more intuitive to navigate and user-friendly. We’ve made improvements like simplifying how we verify your brand's website, and allowing you to pre-populate your product information to save time during setup. You’ll also view suggestions on the homepage with simple ways to optimize your presence on Google. If you’re an advanced user, you can customize the Merchant Center Next with feature add-ons, such as those for loyalty programs.
Learn more about what you can expect from the new Merchant Center in this blog post.
What’s changing
Google Merchant Center is upgrading to the new Merchant Center platform, offering improved functionality and design compared to classic Merchant Center. Let's explore the main changes Merchant Center Next brings.
| Features and experience | Classic Merchant Center | Merchant Center Next |
|---|---|---|
| Product Studio | Not available | Available for merchants in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, India, and Japan |
| Designed for international success | No unified way of managing international configuration where you sell your products | International setup information now gathered at a glance centrally, with a new overview showing status and actions across all countries where you sell your products |
| Consistent and decluttered experience | Complicated user interface | Advanced, complex features centrally located in one place as add-ons. Features already used in classic Merchant Center will be activated by default when you transition to Merchant Center Next. |
| Crawled products | You had to choose crawled products explicitly as an upload method | Crawled product data from your website will be added by default, both for newly joining merchants and for existing merchants (complementing the products you’ve added yourselves) |
| New product list | Online and local products managed independently |
Unified product list allows omnichannel merchants to manage their online and local versions of a product in the same place and update them with a modernized product editor. Simplified diagnostics with clearer prioritization of issues by their potential. Powerful features like supplemental feeds and feed rules continue to be available. |
| Omnichannel support | Online and local products managed independently |
Omnichannel support throughout for merchants who have both online and local stores:
|
| Seamless ads integration |
You can create basic automated ad campaigns directly from Merchant Center without needing to access Google Ads. If you wish to use the full breadth of the Google Ads offering, you can still go there and take advantage of it all. |
|
| Reporting and insights | Reporting spread across different parts of Merchant Center | One holistic and consistent reporting suite in a single place allowing you to understand your product performance and how you can improve it |
| Recommended actions | Recommendations around what to focus on are spread across the platform in different features and experiences |
Central hub for guidance, prioritizing the next most valuable action right on the Merchant Center Next homepage. More recommended actions are customized for you, suggesting tasks with the most impact on your product performance. |
Note: You’ll also find some different user interface concepts in Merchant Center Next. For example, “Destinations” are now referred to as “Marketing Methods”, and “Feeds” are now referred to as “Data Sources”. Previously, you can check issues under the “Diagnostics” page in classic Merchant Center. This is now available under the “Needs attention” tab within the “Products” page in Merchant Center Next.
Get to know your way around Merchant Center Next by visiting this article.
Get answers to frequently asked questions about the upgrade.