Multi-channel products can appear in your online destinations (i.e. Shopping ads and free product listings) and your local destinations (i.e. local inventory ads and free local product listings). If you’re using a primary feed, you can select multiple destinations for your products.
If you’re using the Shopping Content API instead, you’ll have to submit the product data twice: once with the “local” channel and once with the “online” channel. Make sure to submit the products with the same ID [id] if you want those products to be associated. We match these products using identification attributes.
Local-only products only have the “free local product listings” or “local inventory ads” destinations selected. These products are only available in-store.
If you have both online and local destinations enabled in your primary feed, but certain products are sold exclusively online or locally, use the excluded destination [excluded_destination] attribute to indicate which destination a specific product shouldn’t be available in.
Benefits
It’s important to review this information to make sure the number of products you list as multi-channel and local-only correspond with your business reality. If you list products correctly as multi-channel, you can highlight both the online and in-store availability of those products to help increase opportunities for sales.