Product Catalog Tips for BigCommerce Google Shopping Optimization

This article is ARCHIVED.
The information in this article is likely to be out of date.

We have many customers who have been migrating their product catalogs from other e-commerce platforms to BigCommerce. We also have many customers who are adding their products to Google Shopping for the first time. Based on our experience setting up optimized Google Shopping feeds for our customers, here are some tips on how to enter your product data into your BigCommerce product catalog.

Enable Products for Google Shopping

• Enable all products for Google Shopping
• Fill in any google shopping specific attributes like color, size, age_group, gender, material, and pattern, that apply to the parent item.

Enable Categories for Google Shopping

You have generally four options:

1. Set a Default Value for google_product_category on the Manage Feed > Define Fields page. This will apply to all your items.
2. In your BigCommerce dashboard, assign each category to the appropriate Google Product Search category using the instructions below.
3. Use our Categorization Service where we maintain the categorization for you for an additional fee.
4. Map google_product_category to a custom attribute in your product catalog. (not common)

How to assign Google Product Categories in BigCommerce

• Log into your BigCommerce Store Admin Panel
• Go to Product > Product Categories
• Expand categories until you see a leaf category (a category with no sub-categories)
• Click the three dots icon for the leaf category and select Edit
• Click the Google Shopping tab on the Edit Category page
• Check the box where it says Enable Google Shopping; Yes, enable Google Shopping for this category
• Click on the Google Product Category input box that appears, or the folder icon next to it
• Select the appropriate Google Product Category. (On our site, you can use the Manage Feed > Taxonomy Search tool to quickly find the matching category with the search-as-you-type feature.)
• Click the Save & Exit button
• Repeat these steps for every leaf category
• Contact us to enable import of the Google Product Search data on your feed, and verify that it is working.

Create Variation SKUs for Google Shopping

• Migrate sizes and colors of each item as options of the BigCommerce items. It does not matter if every item gets its own option set. Here are the important points:
  • Option display name must be 'Color' or 'Size' (or whatever applies)
  • Sizes and colors need to be added in the correct order
  • Generate a variant SKU for each variation (From the options tab, there is a button to auto-generate the SKUs. You can tell it how to generate the variant SKUs, or let it auto-generate variant SKUs.) If variant SKUs are not generated, our Standard feed will not generate the variations (a Custom feed can be used).
  • Enter a variant-specific UPC and/or MPN for each variant.

Migration

Migrating from other platforms is tricky, and we do not recommend using a free tool to do it. Instead, we recommend Cart2Cart as a shopping cart migration service. They have been doing migrations for many years, and we have seen our customers successfully use their services.

Feel free to contact us if you have questions.