A feature I only just spotted
Hello everyone, today I discovered something interesting inside Google Merchant Center, and I want to walk you through it.
If you have multiple Google Business Profile accounts, or multiple stores linked under one account, you can now assign individual products in Merchant Center back to those Google Business Profiles. This feature may have been around for a while, but I’ve only noticed it now. So let’s discover together what it actually does.
Where to find it in Merchant Center
Open any product in Merchant Center and scroll to the bottom of the product listing. Underneath Additional details, you’ll see a section called Shops, along with the locations, fulfillment and related details.
If you have multiple stores, you can assign the product to shops here. Clicking it doesn’t open a separate settings screen. Instead, it takes you straight to the product details page itself.
The new section in product details
This is the same page you see when you add a product manually. A new section under Price, condition, and availability lets you assign the product to multiple Google Business Profile listings. If you have several profiles linked, they show up here.
Click Manage shops and you’ll see the profiles you’ve linked to Merchant Center. From there, you can add or remove profiles for that specific product.
I had never seen this before. Most of my clients either don’t use local listings or only have one store, so I’ve only ever linked a single account and left it at that. Being able to choose between multiple profiles per product, right inside the product details, is quite interesting.
What I think this feature is for
My assumption is that this feature submits products to the Google Business Profile itself. In other words, it controls which products appear on each store’s business listing.
I don’t believe it’s meant for local listings in Google Shopping or for local inventory ads in Google Ads. That still runs through your local inventory data. If I’ve got this wrong, please let me know.
Manual assignment or a data feed?
Assigning stores product by product is a difficult setup to maintain, especially once you have more than a handful of products or locations. Every new product, and every change in what a store carries, means another round of manual clicks.
I recommend the data feed solution. Submit a local inventory feed per store instead. That way your store-level availability is managed in bulk and stays in sync with your product data, rather than depending on someone remembering to tick the right boxes in Merchant Center. That is for the local listings in Google Ads. This is not submitting products to Google Business Profile.
Have you used this feature?
I’m really interested in what everybody has to say. Have any of you seen this feature before? If so, how did you find it, and is it actually useful for your stores?
And if my assumption about what it does is wrong, let me know in the comments. I’d love to learn how you’re using it.