Hi, I'm Clarice Lin, the ROI Doctor who help small businesses and online stores get on
Google and YouTube page one.
Today's question, I get it often from a number of Shopify store owners who manufacture their
own products and sell their own products on a ecommerce store, specifically on Shopify.
So if you already aware that you need a Google Merchant Center account, and you're setting
it up, so during your setup, you might get one of this error, which says limited performance
due to missing identifiers.
And this could affect your products getting listed on Google Shopping.
So how could you eliminate this issue?
Or how can you resolve it?
So limited performance due to unique identifiers that is the GTIN, MPN, and the brand.
So these are these three pieces of information which Google will assume that each of your
products should have this information so that customers will know that these are legit products
from legit manufacturers.
So these pieces of information are essential for Shopify store owners who are getting their
products from other retailers.
If you look at these three pieces of information, essentially, that's global trade item number,
and MPN, which is Manufacturer Part number.
So if you're getting your products from a specific manufacturer who only manufacture
one product, so they would have to provide a manufacturer number which all their retailers
will have these pieces of information.
So you can feed this into your Google Merchant Center account.
Similarly, if a manufacturer sells multiple products with different model number still
would have unique Manufacturer Part number, which you also need to provide it to Google.
However, if you are selling your own product, manufacturing your own items, you wouldn't
have those numbers.
And presumably you might not even have a SKU number, because you're just selling your own
product.
So there is no need to have this unique identifiers each of your products, you know that there
are unique by itself.
So what do you do then when Google Merchant Center throws you this error and refuses to
approve your account?
What you need to do is you need to go to your setup, which I'm going to share with you some
short clips, so you can follow along with the screenshot.
But before I go into that, I'm going to explain really quickly, what you need to do.
What you need to understand is that you need to update this piece of information within
the Merchant Center account.
And this attribute name is called "Identifier Exists".
Once you update this piece of information here, you tell Google, you don't have a unique
identifier, and they can pull out other pieces of information directly from your Shopify
store without needing those numbers that doesn't exist.
So this piece of information is not available for you to update in Shopify store.
I'm going to show you now how to do it.
So let's head onto my computer.
First things first, head onto your Google Merchant Center account.
And this is what you will see on your homepage.
Click on products, under products you will see Feeds, click on Feeds, and you will see
Primary Feeds as what you can see right now.
And if you have already set up in, an automated feed Google Content API for Shopping, this
means that your product information from the Shopify store is fed automatically to Google
Merchant Center account.
Any changes that you made or any products that you have, so the numbers will automatically
be updated here.
So that's something that you want to set up on one time basis.
So you don't have to manage this product feed.
If you're not using an automated feed and you're using Google sheets or text files,
that's something that you might have to manually update it whenever you have some changes in
your products.
I'd highly recommend you to set up a content feed like what I have right here, if you haven't.
And once you have this set up and you want to update this attribute that says "Identifier
Exists".
This is what you do, you click on the feed name itself.
And you will see this screen show up, it will show you exactly the feed, what's in the feed
itself.
By default, it will come to the Settings page.
What what you need to do is to click on Feed Rules.
Right next to Settings.
This is what you will see right here, and this is the screen.
To update this attribute that I've been talking about, click on the plus button, you will
see this dialog box pop up, as you can see over here, right here at the center bottom
of the page.
And you type in the word identifier into this search field over here.
This is going to pop up this green font that says "Identifier Exists".
So that's the attribute name.
So click on that.
And the next thing, it's going to bring you to change this information.
So by default Shopify sends, "Identifier Exists" equals to true, if you see on the right hand
side of the screen, by default, the attribute name has been set to true, is "Identifier
Exists" true.
What we want to do here to resolve the Google Merchant Center missing identifier issue is
to change this true to false.
Look at the left hand side of the screen.
Now, under data sources you can see "Add Source", so click on Add source, you will see this.
A screen that allows you to edit the source, which is this attribute.
If you can see on the right hand side, there is a blue smaller panel that says "editing
in progress", which means you're updating or changing the value of this attribute.
So you can see on the screen "Set to, "Extract" and "Take latest".
To set a specific value for all your products, you want to set it all to false.
So click on Set to.
And this is what you will see, the moment you click on Set to, a dialog box will pop
up.
Okay, follow the instructions on the screen right here.
If you look at step one, at the bottom, it says type in No.
So basically in this dialog box, type "n","o" in there.
And then the second dialog box appears.
And you can see this add value, no pops up.
Click on No.
So the font is in black, the one that you've typed in.
And next.
After you have clicked on No, the value is set.
So that attribute says set to no, is set.
So this is the value you want to set No.
And the blue button, OK, on the bottom right hand side of the screen will show up.
So it will turn blue.
So it's enabled, so you can actually click on it.
Before that it's grey.
If you can see on the screen at the bottom right hand corner, Cancel and OK, they're
all in grayed out format, which means that the button is not clickable.
And once you click on no, it change to blue.
After you click on OK.
This is what you see.
Set to, it go back to the previous screen as before, say set to No.
And then you can see on the right hand side of the screen.
Okay, after you're set to no, Google will set the "Identifier Exists" field to default
value of false so when you type in No, it means that you want to set it to false.
That basically means that all your products don't, doesn't need an MPN nor a GTIN number.
And you can see as well on the screen, the top of the screen, Save as draft, the blue
button, it turns blue now.
Before that it was grayed out.
So you click on that, save as draft.
And it will take you back to the main screen under Feed Rules.
At this point, because you have made some changes, they will ask you, you have created
a draft of your Feed Rules so you can test them before you apply them to your Feed.
When you're satisfied with the test results, apply the rules.
So if you're only making one change, like what I'm doing right now, you're very happy,
you can just directly click on "Apply" and the changes will be done.
However, if you are on the cautious side, you can click on "test changes" to see how
the changes are and the number of products that will be impacted by it.
So if you have, let's say 66 products, it will tell you that they are making 66 changes.
So it's basically just a preview of the changes that you're making.
Otherwise, when you click on "Apply", that's it.
I hope that was useful for you.
So this is a one time setup.
Once you have update it in your Google Merchant Center account, you wouldn't need to update
it anymore.
So if there is, there are any future updates or any product that you have sold and it's
supposed to be updated in Google Merchant Center, this information will be automatically
synced.
So that saves you a lot of work.
And you will always keep your product feed updated in Google.
So if you are struggling to get your Merchant Center account set up, or if you haven't set
up your Google channel on your Shopify store, you can check out my other playlists right
here, which tells you all these pieces of information which you can do it yourself.
And there's also another playlist where I talk about how you can sell more on your online
store.
So these are different marketing tactics which you can implement for your store.
So I hope you will check that out.
If you found this video about product identifier useful, hit the like button and subscribe
to my channel for more of these videos about Google Shopping and ranking on Google search
for your online store.
I'll see you in the next video.
Bye!