Google Merchant Center Next will replace Merchant Center by 2024. It will automatically pull in products, pricing, imagery, and more from your website
September 25, 2023, Google announced the launch of Merchant Center Next, a new, simplified version of its popular e-commerce platform. Merchant Center Next is designed to make it easier for businesses of all sizes to promote their products across Google, including Search, Shopping, and YouTube.
One of the key features of Merchant Center Next is its ability to populate product information from a merchant’s website automatically. This eliminates the need for merchants to manually upload a product feed, which can be a time-consuming and error-prone process.
Merchant Center Next also gives merchants more control over how their products appear on Google. For example, merchants can customize their product descriptions, titles, and images. They can also choose which products to show in different channels, such as Google Search and Shopping.
In addition, Merchant Center Next offers a number of new insights and features to help merchants improve their performance. For example, merchants can now see which products are selling well and which are not. They can also get recommendations on improving their product listings and fixing product errors.
Merchant Center Next also offers several other features and improvements, including:
- A simplified onboarding process
- New insights and recommendations to help you improve your product performance
- The ability to manage your online and in-store product inventory in one place
- Support for more countries and languages
Here are some of the key benefits of Merchant Center Next
- Simplified onboarding: Merchant Center Next is easier to start with, with a simplified flow for website verification through additional methods such as email verification.
- Automatic product population: Merchant Center Next can automatically populate product information from your website, eliminating the need for manual feed uploads.
- More control over product listings: Merchant Center Next gives you more control over how your products appear on Google, including the ability to customize product descriptions, titles, and images.
- New insights and features: Merchant Center Next offers a number of new insights and features to help you improve your performance, such as top-selling products and brands on Google and guidance on performance improvements.
- Save time and effort: Merchant Center Next will automatically pull in and update your product feed, so you can spend less time managing your feed and more time selling.
- Get more exposure: Merchant Center Next will make it easier to get your products seen by shoppers on Google, including in Search, Shopping, and Display ads.
- Improve your performance: Merchant Center Next provides insights and recommendations to help you improve your product feed and performance.
What does Merchant Center Next mean for retailers?
Merchant Center Next is a significant improvement over the previous version of Merchant Center. It is simpler to use, more efficient and offers a number of new features that can help retailers improve their product performance.
How to get started with Merchant Center Next
You can create a Merchant Center Next account here if you are a new user. If you are an existing Merchant Center user, you will be invited to update your experience to Merchant Center Next in the coming months.
Upgrading to Google Merchant Center Next is easy and free. Simply sign in to your existing Merchant Center account and follow the prompts. If you are a merchant who uses Google Merchant Center, I encourage you to learn more about Google Merchant Center Next and start preparing for the transition.