Manage your data sources

When you add data about your products to Merchant Center a data source is created. You can use a single or multiple data sources to add your data. You can use the same or different upload methods for each of your data sources.

How to find the Data sources tab

There are 2 ways to navigate to the Data sources tab:

Option 1: Select “Data sources” under the settings icon in the top right of Merchant Center.

Option 2: Select “Products” from the left navigation menu, then select the View data sources link on the “All products” tab.

Understanding what’s on the Data sources tab

The “Source” column shows the upload method that was used for each data source.

Learn more about how to upload your products to Merchant Center.

The “update” button allows you to manually trigger a refresh of the products in a particular data source.

If the same product is uploaded via different data sources, then the product will be considered part of the data source that was most recently updated.

Example

Timestamp 1
- Products A and B are uploaded via the spreadsheet based data source X.
- As the most recent updates of products A and B are via data source A, both products are considered as part of data source X.
Timestamp 2
- Product A is included in the upload of spreadsheet based data source, data source Y.
- As the most recent update of product A is via data source Y, product A is now considered part of data source Y.
Timestamp 3
- Product A and Product B are removed from the data source X spreadsheet.
Timestamp 4
- Data source X is refreshed.
- Product B is deleted from Merchant Center as it is no longer present in the latest upload of the owning data source, data source X.
- However, product A remains in Merchant Center as it is owned by data source Y.

Automatically added products

In Merchant Center Next there are two types of experience for adding products automatically from your online store. Which experience you see in your Merchant Center will depend on a variety of factors. It is not possible to change which experience that is available in your Merchant Center.

Learn more about adding products automatically from your online store.

Experience 1

If your Merchant Center is eligible for Experience 1, then the Data Sources tab will be split into two sections:

"Provided by you" lists data sources that you have created to upload product data to Merchant Center.
"Found by Google" provides details of additional items that Google has found on your online store.

Experience 2

If your Merchant Center is eligible for Experience 2 and is adding products automatically, the Data sources tab will show a data source with "website crawl" in the "Source" column.

Discrepancies in the number of products across different versions of Merchant Center

Merchant Center Classic vs. Merchant Center Next:

Merchant Center Classic counts products for different destinations and target countries separately, while Merchant Center Next unifies them.

Merchant Center Next and Shopping Content API:

Merchant Center Next and Shopping Content API (SCAPI) count products differently.Merchant Center Next counts each product only once, while (SCAPI) counts each product multiple times if it's sold in multiple countries.Be aware of this difference if you want to compare product counts between Merchant Center Next and SCAPI.

Remove a product data source or feed label

Product data that has been removed or deleted from your Merchant Center account may take up to one hour to reflect in your ads and free listings. If you have enabled a scheduled fetch for the deleted product data source, the fetch will not take place until the product data source is recreated.

Remove a product data source

In your Merchant Center account, click on the Settings & tools icon in the top right.
Click Data sources.
On the “Product sources” tab, select the product data source that you want to remove.
Click the 3 dot menu icon under “Actions” column.
Click Delete source.
On the pop-up that appears, click Remove.

The items in this data source will not be available for Shopping anymore.

If you’re replacing an old product data source with a new product data source that contains similar product data, the new product data source should be uploaded before you remove the old product data source. This allows the item IDs and associated history to transfer to the new product data source.

If you'd like to remove a specific product from your product data, go to the List section.

Data source labels

Previously product data sources could have multiple labels and language combinations (“data-targets”). Now, a product data source will only be able to have a single data target.Product data sources that have multiple combinations of a feed label and language will now be regrouped into product data sources that each have only one combination of feed label - language data target.

A feed label can only be removed by deleting and recreating the product data source.

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