Why advertisers aren’t happy about Google Merchant Center Next

Google is encouraging merchants to try out its new “Merchant Center Next” platform, promising enhanced features and simplified product management. However advertisers are citing issues with this evolution of Merchant Center.

Why we care. Even though the old version of Merchant Center can still be used, advertisers have seen prompts for advertisers to upgrade to Google Merchant Centre Next (GMC Next). Will the issues advertisers are seeing in Merchant Centre Next be addressed before the old version is completely deprecated. 

Key features.

• AI-powered product image editing
• Automatic product addition from online stores
• Enhanced issue resolution with prioritization
• Comprehensive performance insights

The upgrade offers AI-powered tools and streamlined processes that could significantly improve merchants’ ability to manage and promote their products on Google’s platforms.

First seen. We were alerted to the prompt from Google to upgrade from Thomas Eccel’s LinkedIn:

The issues. I asked advertisers on X what their issue with GMC Next is. Zato owner Kirk Williams is unhappy with the fact that it doesn’t have feed rules or supplemental feeds:

“GMC Next currently does not have feed rules or supplemental feeds, which is a huge problem since many businesses use those bulk editing options and cannot switch to the new interface without support. Moving forward, even if more feedless options are utilized, there still needs to be the option for bulk edits. Google has let me know this is on their roadmap for Next, but there has been no confirmation of timeline on that.”

Head of Performance Marketing Jennifer Mussell‘s issue with GMC Next and her client’s account is the issue of products not being pulled in properly:

“When connecting the google app in shopify to GMC next, not all products from the website are being pulled through into the merchant centre next. At first, we thought this may be an issue with the time taken for products to process as merchant centre next seems to update products on different days. However, after waiting for 5 days we still don’t see one of our bestselling products pull through. After speaking to google support, it seems that products added to GMC via an API link only get updated when the product within shopify has an edit so there isn’t a way to ask google to re-crawl the whole feed.

This can also cause issues if you’re using a Shopify app that is editing products after they have been updated on a product page for example by adding a custom label. It would be great to have a way of to ask google to re-crawl the products on site like in the old merchant centre where you could reprocess a feed. FYI this issue is for an advertiser with less than 250 products so we can rule put the number of total products being an issue on the Shopify side.”

Supplemental feed. Williams shared his frustration about no supplemental feed on X. In response Head of Ecommerce, Mike Ryan shared a solution that only became available this month (July 2024):

Steps to allow you to add supplemental feed:

• In your Merchant Center, on the right of the top bar, click the Settings & tools icon
• Select Add-ons.
• In the “Discover” tab, select Activate for the Advanced data source management card.
  • A list of Active Add-ons are found in the “Active” tab.
  • If you’d like to deactivate Advanced data source management, click Deactivate for the
    Advanced data source management card.
• When activated, a new navigation item is added to the “Active” tab for “Advanced data
  source managements”.

What’s next. Watch for wider rollout of AI features and potential mandatory migration to the new platform in the future.