Product Feeds: Google Shopping, Meta and TikTok Catalogs, and In-Store Stock on Google

Overview

A product feed is a file listing your products — name, description, price, photos, stock, brand and barcode — that a shopping channel reads to show your products in its ads and shops. Open Marketing → Product feeds to switch one on for:

• Google Shopping (Google Merchant Center)
• Facebook & Instagram (Meta Commerce Manager catalog)
• TikTok (TikTok catalog)

Product feeds are on the Scale plan and above.

Switching a feed on

1. Turn the feed on. Prices go out in your store's own currency, exactly as checkout charges them; a store that sells in CAD lists CAD.
2. Copy its Public feed URL — your store's own address followed by /feeds/google.xml, /feeds/meta.xml or /feeds/tiktok.csv.
3. Paste that URL into the channel as a scheduled feed (in Merchant Center, Commerce Manager or TikTok's catalog settings). The channel then fetches it on its own schedule.

The feed is built from your catalog each time a channel fetches it, so a change reaches the channel at its next fetch. (A channel may keep its copy for up to an hour before asking again.) If a channel names a field differently, you can remap it on the same page.

Which products are in a feed

A product appears in a feed when it is active, visible on that store and priced in that store's currency. Products you can't sell from your own checkout — affiliate listings, and Network Search items you have not added to your catalogue — are left out, so a paid click never lands on a product that cannot be bought.

Choosing feeds product by product

On a product's edit page, under Marketplace identifiers → Product feeds, choose:

• Every feed I have switched on — the default.
• Only the feeds I pick — for example Google Shopping but not TikTok.
• No feeds — the product stays in your store but is not sent to any shopping channel.

The feed follows your choice from the next time a channel fetches it.

In-store stock on Google (local inventory)

If you have shops, Google can show shoppers nearby which one has an item on the shelf. BestWebby builds that from the stock you already keep per location, as a local inventory feed that Merchant Center fetches on a schedule. It is on the same page, Marketing → Product feeds, under Google local inventory, and is part of Product feeds on the Scale plan and above. Google offers local inventory in Canada.

What the feed lists

For each shop you have mapped and each product in your Google product feed, one row with:

• the shop's store code and the product's id (the same id as in the Google product feed);
• the quantity on hand at that shop, and its availability: in stock, limited (at or below the threshold you set, 3 units unless you change it; 0 turns "limited" off), or out of stock;
• a price only when that shop charges something different from your website — a franchise location with its own storefront, for example;
• for shops that offer pickup, pickup (pay online, collect in store) and how soon an order is ready, which you choose.

A product with sizes or colours is listed once per shop with its variants added together, because the product feed lists it once.

Left out, so that Google is never told something we cannot back up:

• Locations without a store code. Nothing about them is in the feed.
• Shops in another market. Each storefront has its own feed URL and lists only the shops that sell in its currency: a franchise location's own storefront decides, otherwise the country on the location's address. A shop with a store code but no country we recognise is left out until you add one.
• Products whose stock is not assigned to locations, or that do not track stock, since there is no count for any one shop.
• Digital products, services, gift cards, affiliate listings and Network Search items.

Setting it up

1. In Google Business Profile, note each shop's store code.
2. In Merchant Center, link your Business Profile, then add local listings for your country.
3. In Settings → Locations, edit each shop: enter its Google store code exactly as in Business Profile, and its country.
4. Keep the Google product feed switched on and added in Merchant Center.
5. Turn on Google local inventory, set the limited-stock threshold (and pickup time, if a mapped shop offers pickup), and Save. Copy the Feed URL for the storefront that sells in that country.
6. In Merchant Center, add a local inventory data source that fetches a file from a URL on a schedule, paste the link, and set it to fetch daily.
7. After the first fetch, check Merchant Center's diagnostics. Google may ask you to confirm your in-store stock before local listings show.

The feed link

The link carries a private key, because shop-by-shop stock counts are commercially sensitive. It is shown once, when it is made; we keep only a fingerprint of it. If you lose it, choose New link: the old one stops working straight away, so update it in Merchant Center. A wrong or old link, or a feed that is switched off, gets "not found".

Status

The card shows, for each storefront, how many rows and shops the feed has and anything to fix: shops with no store code or no country, products with stock not assigned to shops, and products with no barcode (GTIN) or MPN, which Google matches less reliably. The status is refreshed once a day with your product feeds, and whenever you choose Check now. The feed Google fetches is always built from your stock at that moment. Google last fetched tells you Merchant Center is collecting it.

Good to know

• A feed only reaches a channel once you have added the URL there; switching it on here does not register it for you.
• Your storefront also lists its feed URLs for shopping agents, in its llms.txt file and its agent manifest. Only the feeds you have switched on are listed there: switch one off and it leaves those lists too.
• A pricing rule that raises a price (see Promotions and discount codes) is in the feed. One that lowers a price, such as a happy hour, is not: the feed keeps your regular price and checkout charges the lower one.
• A barcode (GTIN) and brand help channels match your product, and some channels require them for certain categories. Both are under Marketplace identifiers on the product.