How to onboard as a point of sale (POS) or inventory data provider
Here are the accounts 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 feed and an optional store feed:
- In your Merchant Center, click Products from the navigation menu, and then select Other Feeds.
- Click the plus icon to add a new feed.
- Create the relevant feeds and configure the appropriate settings for each feed:
Upload feeds to your Merchant Center account via SFTP or Google Cloud Storage using the specifications as defined in the feed spec.
If you manage many merchants, it’s recommended to use the Content API for Shoppingusing the POS API. To be enabled for sending data on your Merchant’s behalf, get in touch with your Google Business Partner.
Review feed processing results
You’re able to review the results of all feed processing for file-based or Google Sheet-based feeds. To find the results:
- In your Merchant Center, from the navigation panel, click Products, and then click Other Feeds.
- Click the POS feed name you’d like to review.
- Review the results:
- Properties: This includes key feed properties, which vary depending on the input method of the feed. 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 feed is opted into, we require attributes to adhere to the product data specification. In this section, you can review all of the attributes we found in your feed, including those attributes which are recognized and map to the feed specification, and also unrecognized attributes which don’t match any of those listed in the product data specification. You may review the list and use tools, such as Feed 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 feed as well as those with any detected item issues. Review the list of item issues to understand how many items in your feed are impacted, including examples and links to documentation to address the issue.