FeedMender

FeedMender/Install

Putting it in place

Nine steps, once

Everything stays in your own Google account, and nothing you do here can touch the feed your shop exports. The first three steps are in Google Sheets, the rest are in Merchant Center.

In your own Google account

  1. 1

    Download both files

    The report, and the corrections as a spreadsheet file. The corrections are what Merchant Center will read; the report is for you, and it names the primary source, feed label and language the corrections have to be attached to.

  2. 2

    Import it into a new Google Sheet

    In Google Sheets, use File, Import, Upload, and replace the spreadsheet. Give it a name you will still recognise in six months, something like "FeedMender corrections, shop.example.com". The sheet lives in your account, and Merchant Center will read it from there rather than from anything we host.

  3. 3

    Check two cells before you go on

    Find a product id and a barcode that starts with a zero. If the zero has disappeared, or a barcode now reads 8.71E+12, the import turned text into numbers. Import again with that conversion switched off. Everything in our file is stored as text, so this only happens when the spreadsheet is asked to be clever.

In Merchant Center

  1. 4

    Open Settings, Data sources, Supplemental sources

    Then Add supplemental product data. If there is no Supplemental sources tab, look under Settings, Add-ons first. A supplemental source is a second file attached to your account; it does not replace your primary feed and cannot stand on its own.

  2. 5

    Choose Google Sheets, and pick the sheet you just made

    The existing spreadsheet, not the template Merchant Center offers to create. It connects through your own Google account, so the sheet stays private and we never see it. On a managed Workspace an administrator may have to allow the Merchant Center service account once, which is one setting rather than a project.

  3. 6

    Attach it to the right primary source

    Feed label and language have to match the source it belongs to, or the two will not join. A supplemental source only updates products whose id it finds in that primary source, and it cannot add or remove products, which is also why it cannot break anything.

  4. 7

    Leave the schedule alone

    Google reads the sheet every 24 hours by default. That daily read is also what stops the data lapsing, which it would do 30 days after its last refresh. There is nothing to gain by fetching it more often.

  5. 8

    Paste the attribute rules from the report

    Some corrections are deliberately not pinned to a fixed value, because a value would freeze what we happened to see: the price format and your own stock wording are the clear cases, since pinning a price would keep serving the old one through your next sale. For these the report gives an attribute rule, which runs against whatever your feed says on each fetch. Paste each rule against the field the report names.

  6. 9

    Then wait for Google

    Products come back when Merchant Center reprocesses them, not the moment you press save. Nothing more is asked of you after this, and removing the data source later does not delete your sheet.

If something does not line up

  • The supplement seems to do nothing. Check the feed label and language on the supplemental source against the primary source it is attached to. If they do not match, Google does not join the two, and the overlay silently applies to nothing.
  • A barcode reads 8.71E+12, or a leading zero vanished. The spreadsheet converted text to a number on import. Re-import with automatic conversion switched off; everything in the file is stored as text and only breaks when the sheet is asked to reformat it.
  • Merchant Center cannot open the sheet. On a managed Google Workspace, an administrator may need to allow the Merchant Center service account to read files once. It is a single setting, not a project.
  • Products have not come back yet. That is expected for a while. Google reprocesses on its own schedule after it next fetches the sources, so the change shows up on its timing rather than the moment you save.
  • You want to undo it. Remove the supplemental data source in Merchant Center. That stops the overlay applying and does not delete your sheet or touch your primary feed.
  • You added products since the scan. The per-product corrections cover only the ids that were in the file we read, so run a fresh scan that includes the new products and replace the sheet's contents with the new corrections. The scan is free, so this costs nothing to check.
Note for the person shipping this. The attribute-rule steps and any title rewrite described in the report have not yet been confirmed end to end in a live Merchant Center. Run them once in a real account, check that a rewritten title actually reaches the served product, and only then remove the noindex tag at the top of this file.