Google Shopping feed template

What goes in a Google Shopping feed template

A Google Shopping feed is a table with one row per sellable item and one column per product attribute. Merchant Center reads the header row as attribute names, so the headers must use Google's exact spelling, lower case with underscores. The table below is the core set: the attributes Google requires for every product, the ones it requires for new products, and the identifier rules that cause most first-upload disapprovals.

Apparel, variant and sale columns the template needs in some cases

The second group is conditional. Google requires it for apparel in six countries and for any product that comes in several colors, sizes or materials; everywhere else it is optional but improves matching. Sale pricing lives in its own two columns so the regular price stays visible.

Google Shopping CSV template or XML feed template?

Merchant Center's file-format page lists tab-delimited text (.txt, .tsv) and XML (RSS 2.0 or Atom 1.0), optionally gzipped. It does not mention comma-separated files, so a CSV you edit in Excel should be saved as tab-delimited text before a manual upload, or pasted into a Google Sheet and added as a Sheets data source. A comma-delimited CSV that Merchant Center fetches from a feed tool's URL is processed without trouble in practice; Textfinity publishes CSV that way and can also publish TSV. XML carries the same attributes with a g: prefix inside an <item> element; it is what most platform plugins emit.

The two formats are interchangeable in what they can express. Pick the spreadsheet if a person maintains the feed and XML if software does. The same product from the CSV download looks like this as an RSS item:

<item>
  <g:id>SKU-10432</g:id>
  <g:title>Nike Pegasus 41 Men's Road Running Shoes, Blue, US 9.5</g:title>
  <g:description>Neutral daily trainer with ReactX foam.</g:description>
  <g:link>https://store.example/products/pegasus-41</g:link>
  <g:image_link>https://cdn.example/pegasus-41-blue.jpg</g:image_link>
  <g:availability>in_stock</g:availability>
  <g:price>129.99 USD</g:price>
  <g:brand>Nike</g:brand>
  <g:gtin>00195866188174</g:gtin>
  <g:condition>new</g:condition>
  <g:item_group_id>PEG41</g:item_group_id>
  <g:color>Blue</g:color>
  <g:size>US 9.5</g:size>
  <g:gender>male</g:gender>
  <g:age_group>adult</g:age_group>
</item>

Google Shopping feed checklist before the first upload

Most first-upload disapprovals come from six mistakes, and all of them are visible in the file before Merchant Center sees it. Run through this list on the template rows, then on a sample of your real export.

• Headers match Google's spelling exactly: image_link, not Image URL; google_product_category, not category.
• price carries a currency code (129.99 USD) and matches the landing page in the same currency; for the US and Canada it excludes tax, for most other countries it includes it.
• availability uses one of the four allowed values. Shopify's stock count and WooCommerce's instock/outofstock need a small lookup or advanced rule.
• Every new product has brand and a GTIN or MPN, or identifier_exists is set to no. Made-up GTINs are a disapproval, not a shortcut.
• Variants share item_group_id and differ in color, size, material or pattern; each variant has its own id and link to the variant page.
• No title is longer than 150 characters and no description longer than 5,000; no title is all caps or starts with the price.
• image_link points at a product image on a plain background, at least 500 × 500 px for the 2027 minimum, with no watermark or promotional text.

Filling the template from Shopify, WooCommerce or an existing CSV

The template is only useful if you never type into it. Every store platform already holds the data; the work is mapping its column names onto Google's. Shopify exposes a product API with variants, so the Textfinity Shopify connection pulls title, body_html, variant price, option values and image URLs directly. WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop and BigCommerce connect through an export URL (CSV, or XML in Google's RSS format) that Textfinity re-reads on a schedule. Anything missing from the export, such as GTINs kept in a spreadsheet or a category lookup, is joined on as a merged source by SKU.

Once connected, the Google Shopping channel template in Textfinity creates one output column per attribute above with the right header. You map each column with a transform: rename for a straight copy, combine to build a title from brand, product name, color and size, replace from regexp to normalize values, and advanced for conditional logic such as availability from a stock count. Filters drop products that should not be in the feed at all, like out-of-stock items or gift cards. The feed is then published as a file on a stable URL, which is added to Merchant Center as a scheduled data source so Google fetches it on its own schedule.