There are multiple ways to add your local inventory data to Merchant Center. You can choose to use a combination of methods to fit your needs as a retailer to help maintain your local inventory data up to date.
This guide can help you decide which upload methods will work best for you.
Your local inventory data sources are managed in the “Supplemental sources” tab under "Data sources", which is found in the top right of Merchant Center under the Settings and tools icon .
On this page
- Ship products to your store
- Add inventory automatically from your online store
- Add inventory from a file
- Use the Content API
Ship products to your store
How it works
If you don’t have your in-store availability promptly and are able to ship your products to your stores for pickup, you can let Google know which products you're able to ship to store via the pickup SLA [pickup_SLA] and pickup method [pickup_method] attributes. We’ll create your in-store inventory for you.
In order for your Merchant Center to be eligible for this method of adding inventory, you must be eligible for product page with in-store availability or store-specific product page with in-store availability and price. The product page or the checkout flow must also display the option to pick up the product at a later day and provide the pickup timeline.
What makes this method great
- This method doesn’t require a full inventory file to get started with local inventory ads.
Things to note
- Shipping products to your online store is only available for local inventory ads.
- You can use attribute rules to submit the required attributes.
Add inventory automatically from your online store
How it works
You can let Google automatically add local inventory from your online store to Merchant Center. This can be done by adding in-store inventory information to your online store and enabling Google to collect this information.
Google automatically finds your products in-store availability provided in your online store and adds the information to Merchant Center.
In order for your Merchant Center to be eligible for this method of adding inventory, you must be eligible for product page with in-store availability or store-specific product page with in-store availability and price. You must not block Google crawlers such as Google StoreBot and Googlebot from crawling your website.
What makes this method great
- It's very simple to set up, all that’s needed is the URL for your online store that you provided in Merchant Center.
- Your in-store inventory information in Merchant Center is updated automatically. Google looks at your online store for any changes (such as price changes or product removals), and then updates the information in Merchant Center.
Things to note
- Google will crawl the top product or store pairs per day. You can also choose specific products and specific stores based on the crawl limits of your website.
- If you wish to cover more inventory, you’ll have to provide the local inventory data via a file or the Content API.
Add inventory from a file
How it works
In Merchant Center, you add a file that contains all your in-store inventory details such as availability of products in each of your stores, prices, pickup SLA, and more. Each product detail in your file should map to our list of attributes.
What makes this method great
- It allows you to use a file you already have and offers the same convenience of automatic update methods but with more versatility.
- Provide inventory information for every one of your stores.
Things to note
- The formatting of your file is very important. Incorrectly formatted or missing data can cause errors in your account. Learn more about Creating a product file for Merchant Center.
- You can choose to do a one-time upload of a file from your computer or host your file from a URL that is synced with Merchant Center every 24 hours. Any updates that you make to the file are reflected in Merchant Center.
- Local inventory data should be refreshed on a daily basis.
Use the Content API
How it works
The Content API for Shopping allows apps to interact directly with the Merchant Center platform, increasing the efficiency of managing large or complex local inventory information.
What makes this method great
- This method offers more flexibility to make frequent changes to your inventory data.
Things to note
- The Content API requires technical integration with your inventory management.