In Part 3 of this Google Shopping video series, we're going to look at steps for a listing of product with variants on Google shopping. For this example we have a book here called Stardust by Neil Gaiman. There are two variants for this product; a paperback edition for $8 and a hardcover edition for $25. If we go into the Store Admin and pull up this product, we can see that it has an attribute set up for its different editions. This attribute is set up as Inventory Variant Products inside of Miva Merchant, which is what is allowing us to have different images and different pricing for each variant of this book. Check out our video on using Inventory Variants if you want to know how to set something like this up from scratch. You'll find the link below.
In order to properly list a product with Inventory Variants on to Google Shopping, you actually need to prep each variant of the product. In this instance, we have two different variants so not only do we need to configure the master product, but will have to go into both the hardcover product variant and the paperback product variant to configure their Google Shopping product settings as well.
If you need to, take note of these products now, which could make it easier for you while you work. I'm going to do a search for Stardust and click into the hardcover variant of the book and then click into its Google Shopping Product Settings tab. This screen will allow us to prep information specific to this product variant that Google requires before submitting the book product for listing on Google shopping all of the bold fields on the screen are required and because I'm setting up a book, the fields I want to make sure that are filled out are the Google Product Category Field, the Description Field and the Global Trade Item Number Field. Google only accepts predefined categories to be typed into this field here, so you'll need to look up the category that pertains to the product you're working with. Google provides lists and spreadsheets of their category taxonomy which you can download at this URL. We've included the URL below this video for your convenience.
I've already downloaded a spreadsheet from Google, so I can find the category I need for my product. Here's the category I need for my book. I can see that it has a category ID of 784. I can copy the Category ID Code and then paste it into the Google Product Category Field inside of Miva Merchant. I also want this Variant product to have a description, so I'll copy the description from the master product and paste in here. Next, let's configure the Global Trade Item Number. Since I'm configuring a book this time around I want to paste in its ISBN. Because I'm using UPS as my shipping service, I want to make sure that this variant product has a weight value. If Google doesn't see a weight value here, this product won't get approved for listing on Google Shopping. That's it for this product variant. I’ll go ahead and save my work by clicking on this “Update” button and then move on to the paperback variant.
Let's click into its Google Shopping product settings tab and we can repeat the process. First I’ll add the Category ID Code. and then next I want to paste in the description. After that I can paste in the ISBN for the paperback edition of this book, which is obviously different from the hardcover variant we just worked on.
Lastly, let me make sure I have a weight value and then I can click on the “Update” button. Now that we're done configuring the variant products, let's go back into the master product. We’ll click into the master products Google Shopping Product Settings and here I want to scroll down to the bottom and make sure that “Variation Image Types” is set to main. This works because I have images configured on the product variant level that have image types defined as Main. This way each product variant will have their own product image on Google Shopping, just like they do on my Miva Merchant store. We'll go ahead and save this by clicking the Update button and now this product is prepped and we can now list a product on Google Shopping. To do that, let's click over to the Google Shopping Products tab of the master product. On this tab, since we’re listing a product with variants, we wanted click the “Upload / Update All Products” button. Doing so will push the information of this master product, as well as the two variant products to Google Shopping. We'll just click this button and then click “Add and Update” and here we see that three products were successfully update to Google Shopping. Notice that there's a column hear called Group ID. Miva Merchant automatically generates this Group ID and assigns it to both of the variant product listings. It's this Group ID that tells Google Shopping that these variant products are related and any similarities that these products might share with one another won't be seen by Google as duplicate information. And that's how you add products to Google Shopping.