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Free Feed Generator

Setting up a Free Feed in Google Merchant Center (GMC)

NOTE: These instructions are specifically for our Free Google Shopping Data Feed Generator. For our paid feed service, please refer to the Google Shopping Feed Setup Guide.

  1. Go to Google Merchant Center (GMC) and sign into your account.
  2. If you have not already set up your website URL, tax, and shipping settings in the GMC, please refer to our Register your Data Feed instructions. These settings are required.
  3. On the Products > Feeds page, click the plus icon in the Primary feeds section.
  4. Enter or confirm the following settings for each step of the New primary feed setup, and click Continue after each step:

    Step 1: Basic information

    • Type: Online products
    • Country of sale: United States
    • Language: English
    • Destinations: Shopping ads, Shopping Actions, etc.

    Step 2: Name and input method

    • Primary feed name: Atensoftware Free Feed
    • How to set up your feed and connect your data: Scheduled fetch

    Step 3: Setup

    • File name:
      Enter the file name part of your feed URL, but replace the "-ABCD.zip" with just ".txt". For example, "mystore-ABCD.zip" becomes "mystore.txt".
    • Fetch frequency: Daily
    • Fetch time: Select a random time
    • Time zone: Select your time zone
    • File URL: Enter the URL you received in your email.
    • Username/Password: Leave blank
  5. The Atensoftware Free Feed feed will appear in the list of Primary feeds. Click the Atensoftware Free Feed link in the Feed name column.
  6. Click on the Settings tab for the data feed.
  7. Click on Feed settings.
  8. Select the settings below and then click the Save button:
    • Encoding: UTF-8
    • Delimiter: Tab (\t)
    • Use quoted fields: Unchecked
  9. No other changes are needed. Default currency can be left as No default currency, and no changes are needed on the Rules tab.

Upon completion of these steps, you will have a data feed file registered in your Google Merchant Center account. Google will automatically fetch the product listings file from our system on a daily basis. To start seeing your products appear in Google Shopping, you still need to set up an Adwords Shopping Campaign.

How to open a tab-delimited text file in Google Sheets from a URL

These instructions describe how to quickly and easily open small, tab-delimited text files from a URL in Google Sheets for easy viewing.

  • Log in to Google Sheets
  • Click the + Blank template under Start a new spreadsheet
  • Click on cell A1 (the top-left cell)
  • Type the following:
    =importdata("http://sample.com/sample.tsv")
    Be sure to replace the sample URL with your own URL.
  • Type the Enter key
  • You will see a Loading... message, and then the data will appear in the spreadsheet

Note, if the file is too large, the cell will contain #N/A and it will have a note attached saying Error - Resource at url contents exceeded maximum size. The file size limit is not documented, but it appears to be less than 4 MB.

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