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Google Shopping is a service from Google that allows customers to search for products on e-commerce websites and compare prices between different vendors (Wikipedia article). Merchants need to sign up for an account in Google Merchant Center to be able to upload their product listings to Google Shopping.


Google Shopping supports the display of product reviews along with product listings. Google Product Review Feeds lets content providers send product reviews to Google Shopping. Our plugin automatically generates XML for both Product feeds as well as Product Review Feed for Google Shopping, and this article will explain how to configure it.


In certain countries, Google Shopping requires a minimum of 50 reviews across all of your products to accept the review feed.



 

Google Merchant Center Account

You'll need a Google Merchant account to submit feeds, if you don’t have an account for Google Merchant Center, please create one.


Product Feed for Google Shopping

Google Shopping requires e-commerce stores to submit Product Feeds with information about products. Google Shopping will display products from your shop based on the information in that feed. Google Merchant support page provides detailed guidance about creating and submitting product feeds (see Create a Feed, via Google Merchant Center).



NOTE: You need to configure and submit a Product Feed to Google Merchant Center before adding a Product Review Feed.



The Product Feed consists of product identifiers (GTINs, MPNs, SKUs, and brand names) and information about products. It is important that product identifiers are unique and the same in both the Product Feed and the Product Review Feed. For more information about product identifiers, please refer to the Google Merchant Center article about unique product identifiers.


Unfortunately, the standard WooCommerce doesn’t include fields to store identifiers such as GTINs or MPNs required by Google Merchant Center. For this reason, our plugin extends standard WooCommerce products and adds custom fields to store product identifiers.


It is up to you to decide which product identifiers you are going to use in your store. Google recommends using as many identifiers as possible. The important thing is that you should use the same identifiers for your Product Feed and Product Review Feed.


A product feed can be configured on the Reviews > Google page of the plugin's settings. The configuration of the Product Feed is done by setting up a mapping between fields in WooCommerce products and Google Shopping product identifiers as shown on the screenshot below:



Next, enable the Generate Product Feed checkbox (on the Overview tab) and save settings. You will see the URL of the file with an XML Product Review Feed for your store in the field Product Feed URL. You should submit the URL of the XML Product Feed in Google Merchant Center and wait until it gets reviewed by Google.


Product Review Feed for Google Shopping

After you configured and submitted a Product Feed to Google Shopping, you can add information about product reviews for your shop. Google Product Review Feeds lets store owners send product reviews to Google Shopping. Our plugin can automatically generate an XML Product Review Feed that is ready for submission to Google Merchant Center.


How to Configure Product Review Feed Generation


The first step in the configuration of the Product Review Feed is to let our plugin know which product identifiers should be included in the XML feed. Our plugin enables you to specify the mapping between the fields with product identifiers and the XML Product Review Feed fields. Go to Reviews > Google page of the plugin’s menu, navigate to Reviews tab, and select appropriate options from the drop-down fields (Fields Mapping). Make sure that you selected the same WooCommerce fields as on the Product Identifiers tab and save settings.



Next, enable the Generate Product Review Feed checkbox (on the Overview tab) and save settings. You will see the URL of the file with an XML Product Review Feed for your store in the field Product Review Feed URL.

You should submit the URL of the XML Product Review Feed in Google Merchant Center and wait until it gets reviewed by Google.


How to Submit your Product Review Feed to Google


Before you submit your Product Review Feed to Google, you need to make sure that you:


Once you have got that settled, here's the step-by-step process to submit your product review feed to Google:


Step 1: Create a new feed

  • Sign in to your Merchant Center account.

  • Click 'Marketing' in the navigation menu, then click 'Product Reviews'

  • Navigate to Product reviews feeds to open the “Feeds” page and click on the plus button to create a new feed



Step 2: Configure your feed

  • Give your feed a name. You can use anything, only you will see this.
  • Choose an upload method - you should select 'Scheduled fetch' option.
  • Configure your feed options for the method you've chosen:
    • Enter the file name
    • Select the fetch frequency from the drop-down menu
    • Select the fetch time from the drop-down menu
    • Select the time zone from the drop-down menu
    • Enter the file URL that you got from CusRev plugin dashboard.

  • Click 'Continue' to finish setting up the product reviews feed.


Why Product Review Feed Doesn’t Include All Reviews?

You might notice that the Product Review Feed doesn’t include all reviews that exist in your WooCommerce store in certain cases. This is because Google doesn’t accept “rating-only” reviews. Our plugin excludes reviews that consist of only ratings.