You've built your store, added your products, and now you want people to actually find them when they search on Google. Until now that meant fiddling with product feeds by hand.

There's a simpler way now.

What landed

Google Merchant Center is now available as an app in your Marketplace. Connect it once, link it to your store, and your eligible products sync across to Google so they can appear on Google Shopping and other Google surfaces.

After that first setup, your product details, pricing, stock levels, images, and variants keep syncing on their own. You change something in your store, it flows through.

Getting connected

Head to your Marketplace and find the Google Merchant Center app. In the screenshot below, you'll see it ready to install.

Install it, then connect your Google account. This is the account tied to your Merchant Center.

Now pick which Merchant Center account you want to use. If you don't have one yet, don't panic - there's documentation inside the app that walks you through creating one and verifying your store domain.

Next, choose the store you want to link. Only products assigned to this store will sync, so if you run more than one store you're only sending across the products that belong to the one you pick here.

What syncs and what doesn't

Once you complete setup, your eligible products start syncing automatically. One-time payment products and digital products are both supported.

A data source is created behind the scenes using the country and language set for your shipping origin. You don't need to touch it. Just know that if it gets deleted, your synced products go with it, and you'd re-sync using Force Sync.

In the screenshot below, you can see the sync status along with any errors or warnings. These are worth a look, because they flag anything that might hold up a product's approval on Google's side.

If you ever need to refresh things by hand, Force Sync does exactly that.

A few things worth knowing

• Only eligible products assigned to the connected store are synced. Products from other stores stay put.
• You need a valid, connected store domain for syncing to work.
• Google reviews and approves your products once they're submitted, so approval is in their hands, not yours.
• You can connect multiple stores to Merchant Center accounts, but once a store or account is linked it can't be used again until you remove that connection.
• This connects your products to Merchant Center. It doesn't create or run any Google Ads campaigns for you.

If getting your products in front of more people has been on your list, this is a straightforward one to set up. Give it fifteen minutes and let the syncing take care of itself from there.