Google Merchant Centre Feed

Hi 

Has anyone used the new Google Merchant Center feed?  I'm having a significant problem with it that Squarespace is flat out refusing to help with and I'm reasonably sure the issue is on their side. I'm coming here to see if anyone can help as the Squarespace support has been so bad on this I'm actually shocked how they can release a feature and then totally wash their hands of any responsibility in supporting it.

The issue is that every single product Squarespace is sending in the feed is being disapproved by Google Merchant Centre. In addition (and perhaps partly because of) the Feed Label is set to "US" and we are NOT a US based company, so we need the feed label set to "UK".  Has anyone else had similar issues and have you been able to address them? Seriously, I can't believe how bad Squarespace support is, truly shocking for a service I PAY for.

Thanks!

The info says your site language needs to be set to English (US) for this to work - is it? https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/12131658984717?platform=v6&websiteId=53e5b04ae4b07d0e4c490c41 

It may be that they are only doing this for the US at the moment (which would not be a surprise, as they are very US-centric). I'm in Canada but my currency is set in the US so I have been able to set up a US feed through Google Merchant crawl directly, and am not sure if going through Squarespace instead will be possible or even be advisable. It doesn't look like they allow for adding any attributes or excluding some products, so how is this better? 

Thanks for your reply cindylouwho2. If this is a US-only feature, they've certainly not communicated that, and that wasn't the answer I got from the (admittedly terrible) support. The feed itself does work (site language is English(US)). And it seems to populate the GMS data better than I've managed to do previously by uploading. I'd given up on using GMS as it's a pain to deal with and I just don't have time to jump through all the hoops, but an automated solution from squarespace sounded great... but it appears it defaults to US targeting and there is no way of changing that, so I can't target products to the customers we actually sell to, and every product is getting disapproved as we don't have tax, etc. set up for US, as that's not our market. It's extremely frustrating, as it has potential to be really useful for us but it's just been launched, either with a "this only works in the US" stealth caveat or with no proper testing outside the US. Maybe the £'s we pay them every year don't mean as much as the $'s do.

I was delighted to see Squarespace introduce the Google Merchant Center API as I've been having to download the Squarespace inventory spreadsheet and changing column heading etc which is quite time consuming.

On the whole it works well with a few (hopefully) teething problems.

I'm UK based and only sell to the UK, by the way.

On 1/13/2023 at 5:43 AM, sussexseamstress0603 said:

The issue is that every single product Squarespace is sending in the feed is being disapproved by Google Merchant Centre.

I didn't have that problem, so can't offer much help. The 'Products > Diagnostics' section should give you a list of specific issues. The Diagnostics did flag up several suggested improvements to my feed and I was able to sort most of them using the 'Products > Feeds > [feed name] > Feed Rules' functions (after a lot of head scratching)

On 1/13/2023 at 5:43 AM, sussexseamstress0603 said:

In addition (and perhaps partly because of) the Feed Label is set to "US" and we are NOT a US based company, so we need the feed label set to "UK".

I was thinking the same thing, although I believe the 'feed label' is no longer linked to a specific country (source) The feed label could really be anything as it's just a label with no particular geographic significance - it's the 'target countries' that dictates where the products will be displayed. The 'feed label' and 'target countries' can be edited at 'Products > Feeds > [feed name] > Settings.

You don't seem to be able to change the 'feed label' name, but you can create new feed labels. I tried several new feed label names (including UK & GB) but nothing apart from 'US' seemed to pull in products so I assume that's just part of how the Squarespace API is coded.

However, it's easy to add 'United Kingdom' as a Target Country, and remove 'United States' if you wish.

So, on to my main niggle....

The API doesn't pull in the variant images from Squarespace to GMC.

So, for example, if you have T-shirt available in red, blue and yellow variants on Squarespace then the API will pull in 3 separate products to GMC (as would be expected) but each product will have a photo of the red T-shirt as the main "image link" attribute and the blue and yellow T-shirt as the "additional image link" attributes. The only way I can see to sort that would be to manually edit the "image link" for the blue and yellow products in GMC. A very time consuming process if you have lots of products.

I contacted Squarespace support via the chat function and was told that this was indeed the case and that my suggestion would be passed on to the developers as a feature request.

Hi, is anyone having issues the with extra /p/ that Squarespace have helpfully added when trying to pull products through to their Google Merchant Centre and worked out a fix?  I can't seem to edit the URL in my products.

I'm glad someone in the UK got this working, but after much to-and-fro between Squarespace and Google, I finally got this answer from Squarespace support:

To clarify, the Google Product Listings feature is currently only available for sites set to English (United States) and products would only display on Google for US-based searches. Our apologies about any confusion here.

Our site is set to English(US), but even if we somehow got the feed to work in GMS without throwing errors, it seems we'd only get shown in US-based search results, which is not that useful for our particular business. I really don't see how it would have been that hard to support additional countries, but there you go.

According to GMC, my feed is active in the UK for both 'Free listings' and 'Shopping listings'

• Free listings will be difficult to check as it can be several weeks before they might start to appear, but everything appears to be set up OK
• Shopping listings seems to work fine. I set up a campaign without any problems and was able to target the UK within Google Ads. I'm not going to give it much of a budget to test it properly due to the incorrect images displaying for variants (as I described previously)

So, the following statements you got from Squarespace Support seem to be incorrect

• "[Google Product Listings is] only available for sites set to English (United States)" - my site is set to "English (United Kingdom)"
• "products would only display on Google for US-based searches" - my Google Merchant Center and Google Ads accounts say otherwise

I'm not sure how the API could limit the geographic reach of the listings anyway. The API just pulls in product info, and the geo-targeting happens within GMC and Google Ads

Re: Squarespace product variant images not being pulled through correctly by the API to GMC, I emailed support and got a fairly generic response, including...

"....it isn't something that we can directly troubleshoot or correct at this time...."

.... and a couple of links to the GMC help pages.

So it looks like I'll be going back to manually entering data into a Google Sheet. It's a time-consuming process, but I've spent quite a few evenings now unsuccessfully trying to wrestle with the API which has taken much more time than manually entering the data would have taken!

Hey ho, I might revisit the API at some point in the future but for now the lack of product variant images makes it unusable for me.

In Google Merchant Center, on the Feeds Tab, you can click on the feed registered by Squarespace, and then click the "Settings" tab. 

On the "Settings" tab, under the "Target countries, language, and destinations" section, click the pencil icon next to the "United States" label.   Select any additional countries like UK, and then click "Save".

I haven't tried it with the built-in Squarespace Google feed, but this should allow you to assign additional English-speaking countries (like UK, Australia, Canada) to the existing feed.

Can someone try this and post here if it works or not?

On 1/28/2023 at 10:19 PM, atensoftware said:

Can someone try this and post here if it works or not?

I believe it does work, although I didn't let the adverts run for long enough to collect data due to the problems with variant images I noted in my previous posts

So I also had this issue. Im not sure if it has fixed the issue yet as only logged on tonight to sort it.

But Google Merchant Centre Dashboard

Then Products

Then Feeds

Click your feed name that is sent by Squarespace it doesnt look like or isnt labelled as an edit field. but if you click the feed name it takes you to a details page

it then shows target countries, Click the pencil, Change it from US to UK. Click save Your Target destinations is now UK.

Ill wait for the reindexing but that does look like it will work.