Google Merchant settings availability dates. One of the latest updates that's going to
start taking effect on June of 26th 2022 is the availability dates. In this video,
I'm going to explain exactly who is this going to affect, this particular availability dates issue
and how you can resolve these issues to make sure your products continue showing up on the Google
Shopping tab whether you are doing advertising or list for free. Hi, I'm Clarice Lin, the ROI
Doctor who helps small businesses and online stores get more traffic and sales by getting on
Google and YouTube page one. If you're new to this channel, you might be interested to check
out some of my playlists on Shopify marketing playlist. And I also have a free download
Shopify Marketing Guide that helps you to explore different ways of driving traffic to your store.
In order to constantly provide a great experience for Google Shopping users,
Google strives to continuously upgrade their process of how they are collecting
the information from different online stores whether you have a Shopify, WooCommerce,
as long as you are selling products online, when you want to adhere to these guidelines and rules,
if you want your products to be listed for free, or for Google Shopping ads.
If you're an online store owner, and you have been having your products shown on Google Shopping tab,
whether it is ads, or just for free listings, you might have received one of these emails
from Google Merchant. This is how it looks like. Basically, it says that from the June 26 onwards,
you need to set an availability date the gist is from June of 26 onwards, you need to set the
availability dates, if your products are listed either pre orders or back orders.
If your products are set to in stock or out of stock, then you don't have to worry about it.
But if you have products that you have run out of stock, or you have products that are new that
you're planning to bring into your store, then you will need to also inform Google
as part of your data feed that you are feeding into Google Merchant Center,
you need to have the availability dates. I want to share some clear background or guidelines. There
are four standard values at Google except for the availability column. In-stock, what it means is
if you have this product, and you allow people to order online and you deliver to where they desire,
that's where you put the products in stock. For that you don't have to set an availability date,
the next accepted value is out of stock. Out of stock basically means you don't have this products
anymore, you're not accepting any orders people can't order anymore. Or maybe this is a product
that you are planning to discontinue and you're not offering it for sale online anymore, then
you can put out of stock. The third accepted value is backorder. Essentially back order means right
now you don't have this product, but you allow people to order in advance. And when the products
are available, then you will send it to them immediately, in order to allow people to pre order
for existing products in advance, you need to populate this column called availability date. The
accepted column name is availability underscore date, there are a certain number of ways
of how you can set this up, which I'm going to explain in the next section. But I want to
go back to the fourth accepted value which is pre order. pre order, the standard column name is pre
order joined together this attribute is meant for if you have a new product that you're launching,
it's not available on the market before, then you use this column. If you use the value pre order,
when you need to put in when this product is available, when will it be available in stock,
if you want people to pre order it, you need to put a date there.
If your products' availability are either in pre order or back order, and you need to set a date,
there is three different criteria you want to take note off. First, the date cannot be more
than one year ahead of the current date. So if your product is available in two years time,
then forget about it. There's no need to even have this product in your system in the first place.
You can exclude that because Google will not accept a date that is further than one year. The
second thing is for this availability underscore date. You can choose to put in the date when it's
going to become available. It's an accepted value by Google and the third criteria is if you want
to specify down to the date and time of when the product will be is going to be available,
it's also possible. If you want to make your life easier then you just put in the dates for now,
because the formatting with the time could be slightly complicated. And if you want to
add in even specific to the timezone of your country of sale in the first place,
then this could also make your life difficult if you're not comfortable with formatting,
so the best option is probably just to stick with the date. And there are three ways which
you can set it up. The first way is you can go to Google Merchant Center account,
and you can go to where you're setting up the rules attribute, you set up a special exception
to set if you have product that is in pre order, status, availability, pre order, you can set
the date which you are going to have the products available. And this will automatically help
you to submit the availability date to Google Merchant Center, this method itself is available
if you have Shopify or WooCommerce store or any other commerce store, you can do this overwrite
itself within the Google Merchant Center for just a couple of products is the easiest,
fastest way to do that, if you have multiple products that have different launch dates or
back order or pre order dates over the entire year, then maybe you might want to download
multiple Google shopping feed app. So this allows you to keep track of the different
availability for different items, you can set it up individually, so it's easier for you to
keep track rather than method one, which I have recommended. There is also the third option I'm
going to explain a bit more detail is you can create your own supplementary feed as well,
instead of using an app, you can create your own supplementary feed, you can create a CSV file
or own a Google sheet itself and then you can put down the list of products, the product ID and the
availability and availability date, you can submit it to Google Merchant on the Google Merchant
Center. And this information will be combined with your existing automated feed that you have set up.
So this information will be updated and it will be complete for Google. I'm going to head on to
the computer to show you exactly how you can set it up. So let's head on to the computer.
First, you will go to Google Merchant Center under feeds. And you have your automated feed set up,
you click on that feed itself, it will bring you to this page, settings and you go to
start editing, click on Create rule. So you can see here. Click and select availability date.
Right just set the availability date for products that have a pre order value is what you can do,
you can set a conditions. For example, if your availability contains the value preorder
then you will set the availability date to let's say in first of July.
And then you will click on OK with the availability attribute is stated as preorder,
it will set the date to first of July. Another way in which you can do it is if
you want to set for specific items. This is what you can do with movies
so you can set for example if you have a specific product and you know the item ID.
So the ID which is the Shopify ID unique for each specific SKU. ID. And you know the SKU number you
type in the value here let's pretend the SKU is 1234567 Right. So for a specific product that has,
it's labeled 1234567, you are going to set the date to first of July, which you have set for
and then click on OK. So for a specific product that has this ID number. We're going to set
it to July 1 And then you can click on Save as Draft. So it's going to go back to the main feed
and then you can click on apply once you click on apply it will be updated to
it. In your supplementary feed, within Google Merchant Center you need to
prepare that information in advance, you could set it up in the
Excel file if you have a license to Microsoft Excel. Or you can also easily
set it up in Google Sheet. For this example, I'm using a Google sheet, you open a new file,
and you give your file a name. In this case, I've put its name as set up availability date.
Once that's set up, then I have
the column name here, just put three column names here. This will be the column names that
you submit into the feed. So the first one is ID, which is the item ID. As I mentioned
in the previous example, ID will be the unique identifier for each of your item.
In this case, I've just come up with a number which is called 1234567.
And I also want to update another item that's called 2345678.
Both these items will be available for pre ordering, these are new products,
will be launching on the first of July. There are two options which I can put it
availability underscore date, you have to use the correct column name for the date, which is
underscore date and availability. And let's presume that this product will be available
on first of July. So this will be the date you will be putting in this particular format
2022 Dash 07 Dash 01. first of July. If you don't put any time by default, this will be available by
12 o'clock, first of july twelve am UTC time. If you're really specific, you really want to go into
this timezone, you can also choose to put here to say it will only be available specifically only at
9am 09 0 0 so the T stands for time, and you put 090000 So this is the time and this is the date,
you have to put in the T to symbolize the time on first of July. And you can go into the timezone as
well. Over here I've put 05, which is the New York time minus 05. Or if I want to put the UK time
which we are in British Summer Time right now, I will then put in plus 01, zero, zero so if you're
confused by this timezone, you know what, just put the date, you will not go wrong with the date,
it's fine, you're not holding a competition, so you don't exactly have to have that precise a date
range. If the, even if the time is a bit strange, then you guess what, just put second of July.
Okay, it's not a showstopper, you're still allowing people to do their ordering. And
this product will still be seen on Google Merchant Center, except they will have a pre order status.
So it's not a big deal to put that, timezone is slightly confusing for most people, so just
forget about that if it's too complicated. Once you have the file done, you can either set it up
in Google Merchant Center, or you can download as a CSV file and upload to Google Merchant Center.
So you can go over here you can export and download a copy over here as a CSV file.
Right now we have the file ready, what you can do is you get back to your Merchant Center under
feeds. Earlier on, we were modifying the rules in the primary feed over here. Now you want to add a
supplementary feed. This method is useful if you have a list of products that have varying dates,
but keeping them on a spreadsheet is easier for you to keep track of everything rather than to
go into the rules, which can be complicated if you want to quickly look through them or review
or if there are any changes. So if you want to add a supplementary feed, supplemental feed over here,
click on add supplemental feed click on it, it'll bring you to a screen
and there are three steps for you to set up as an input setup, and it will integrate with the feed.
You need to give your feed a name whatever name works fine, doesn't matter.
And if you don't want to upload file, a CSV file to the computer, you can also choose to link it
to your Google Sheet give it a name and then, let's say availability date, availabilty date,
then you click on Google Sheet, then you click on Continue, it will bring you to log into your
Gmail account. And once you click onto that Gmail, it will ask you which file you want to
select, and you click on that file, and then you can set it up and add to your
primary fields. It's pretty straightforward. And then you have it all done. Remember that
this option is only available for products in the pre order and back order, status.
And that's it. I hope that will help you to resolve any upcoming issue before June 26. If
you're also facing other issues that are showing up as errors in your Google Merchant Center,
for example, having incorrect mismatched price and availability, you can check out my other video
right here, where I explain to you exactly what you can do with your settings, this one trick
that will help you resolve your issues, so you will always be submitting the latest correct
information to Google Merchant Center. If you want to drive more traffic to your online store,
whether it is Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, Bigcommerce, you might also want to check out my
marketing guide where I explain to you exactly what are the different ways that you can drive
traffic to your store. And you can review those options and decide on the best marketing strategy
to get more traffic and sales in 2022. If you require a one on one support, I also help
online store owners to get more traffic and sales with like different strategy marketing strategy,
whether it is a blogging strategy, YouTube strategy or running ads to get more traffic in the
middle to long term. You can check out my contact method down in the description and pinned comments
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traffic and sales by getting on Google and YouTube page one. I'll see you in the next video. Bye