Promoting Ecommerce Sites with Google Merchant Centre formerly Google Base

Google Merchant Center is a place where vendors can submit products, sell them through this service and promote their goods by search indexing.
Formerly known as Google Base, Merchant Center is better optimised for items listings and products managing. If you are a Google Base user, all your feeds, items and settings have been already relocated into Merchant Center database.
Uploading your products to Merchant Center doesn’t mean targeting a higher position in Google search but being listed when somebody uses the “shopping” link from the Google’s top page, so it’s a targeted action for people searching to buy different stuff using this shopping place. However, depending on their relevancy, uploaded products can also appear in a regular Google search, though this is not a rule.
Items are uploaded into Merchant Center through data feeds so this tutorial will be for submitting products through this method. Its has an extraordinary potential for sales boost so using this service might be a good trick for marketing and selling your items.
Creating a feed translates into compiling your products inventory into a single file that will be added by Google in its products’ searching engine. This is a free service, however, starting to upload your feeds requires setting up a free Google account. So here are the steps for uploading data feeds to Google Merchant Center:
1. Create a Google account

2. Enable Google Merchant Center
Go to Google Merchant Center and fill the required information.

3. Create Data Feed

Accepted data feeds are only in text or XML formats. The easiest way to create a text feed is by working in Microsoft Excel and converting the feed into .txt.
a) On the first line include any relevant information that best describe your items. This header might look like this:

In the rows below, enter information for each product displayed into separate rows:

When you finished your spreadsheet save as .txt and submit it.

b) For uploading items using XML, only RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, and Atom 1.0 versions are supported. Creating and editing these feeds can be done using any text editor, like Notepad for example.

Creating a single item in RSS 2.0 would look like this :

4. Register a data feed

For registering a feed, click on Data Feeds link followed by Register New Data Feed. Here is what you will need to fill in:

Target Country – select the country where you want your items to be displayed in search results
Data feed type – select googlebase
Data feed file name – enter the exactly name of created file and use an extension supported ( text versions with .txt and Atom or RSS with .xml )

Hit Save button. Now data feed is ready to being submitted into Google Merchant Center.

5. Submit Data Feed

There are 3 possibilities for submitting data feeds:

a) Uploading through Google Merchant Center Data Feeds page for files with maximum 20MB size
b) FTP for more than 20MB file size ( a FTP account is required for larger file size )
c) Automatic scheduled upload for a maximum 15MB size
Google recommends uploading via Data Feeds page while the FTP method is prone to encounter different errors. Here are the final steps for uploading a feed to Google Merchant Center:
- sign in and go to Data Feeds link
- locate the feed through the registered ones and click upload file from Uploads column
- click Browse
- select the feed and click Open, verify the name that appears near the Browse button to match with filename
- click Upload and process this file

Once the file have been uploaded a success notification will appear on your screen. It may take 24 hours for a feed to be uploaded, so don’t panic if hours go by and still no updated account.

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