Google Sheets + Google Merchant Center

When the native Google Sheets feed is enough

In Merchant Center, Products → Add products → Use Google Sheets creates a template sheet whose header row is Google's attribute names. You fill rows, delete the instruction rows, set a sync schedule (default every 24 hours) and Google reviews the products like any other data source. Multi-value attributes are escaped with backslashes rather than quotes, and the sheet must stay shared with the Merchant Center service account.

That works until the catalog has a second home. If products are in Shopify, the sheet becomes a copy that drifts: stock, prices and new variants change in the store and nobody re-types them. If the sheet is the only place that knows the brand, the Google category or a custom label, it is the right place for that data, but the wrong place for everything else. The three patterns below keep each kind of data where it belongs.

Pattern 1: the Google Sheet is the catalog

For a catalog that genuinely lives in a sheet (a small maker, a B2B price list, a test set), Textfinity reads the sheet as a shop. The gain over the native option is everything after import: feed hygiene profiles the sheet (empty cells, lengths over 150 characters, inconsistent values), the mapping layer renames your own headers to Google's, filters drop rows you do not want advertised, and the same sheet can feed Meta, Pinterest or Microsoft without a second copy.

Pattern 2: the sheet adds columns the store lacks (merged source)

A Shopify or WooCommerce export rarely carries everything Google wants: google_product_category, custom labels for campaign structure, brand on multi-vendor stores, GTINs kept in a supplier spreadsheet. A merged source in Textfinity joins a Google Sheet onto the primary catalog by a key column (SKU, handle or barcode). The store stays the source of truth for price and stock; the sheet supplies the extra columns; the feed is built from both.

This is the pattern most people are looking for when they search for a 'Shopify Google Sheets product feed'. It replaces Merchant Center supplemental feeds for stores that want one place to see the final product data, and it works for any channel, not just Google.

Pattern 3: the sheet is a lookup table

Two mapping transforms and two rule operators read sheets at rule time. 'Replace from google sheet' finds each column A value inside the field and replaces it with column B, row by row, which is how a store's product types become Google category IDs, or 'Navy' becomes 'Blue' for color normalization. It works on substrings, so a short entry also changes longer values that contain it. 'Extract from google sheet' returns the first value from a sheet list that appears inside the field, such as a brand name inside a title. 'Is in google sheet list' is a filter and conditional-mapping operator: include only brands on the list, or apply a title rule only to SKUs in a sheet.

A lookup sheet is small, owned by whoever manages the taxonomy, and edited without touching the feed. Textfinity re-reads it on the shop's sync schedule, so a category correction in the sheet is in the next rebuild.

product_type,google_product_category
Sneakers,187
Running Shoes,187
Hoodies,212
Coffee Beans,1868

Getting the result into Merchant Center

Whichever pattern you use, the output is a Google Shopping feed on a stable URL, rebuilt on a schedule and within about five minutes after a rule changes. Merchant Center reads it as a product source added from a file, with a scheduled fetch of the URL; we register it in your account with you, through access you give us or on a short call. The native Sheets option can stay for a supplemental feed if you prefer, but with merged sources most stores retire it.