How To Set Up a Google Local Product Inventory Feed with Woocommerce

Setting up a Google local product inventory feed in Google Merchant Centre is the first step to getting your in-store products listed for free on various Google properties. It might look complicated at first, but setting up a local product feed is simple when you have the right tools, and from there enables you to then set up both free local listings and paid-for local inventory ads to help customers see what products you have available and drive footfall to your physical store(s). In this how-to, we’ll guide you through the steps to setting up a local product inventory feed for Woocommerce sites.

In theory, if you’re here looking for advice on how to set up your local product feed, you should already have a primary product feed set up on Google Merchant Centre, and therefore already be comfortable setting up a Google product feed, as the process for setting up both is more or less the same. But if you’re still not very confident in setting up a product feed despite already having one, or were wondering if the processes differ that much (spoiler: they don’t really), then you’re in the right place to find out.

Before you start to set up a local product inventory feed, you need to make sure you have:

• A plug-in installed that’ll enable your website to output product feeds, we recommend Google Product Feed – it’s $79 a year, but the cost is worth it as it makes setting up Google product feeds so simple, even if you’re not an IT whiz
• A primary product feed set up and active in Google Merchant Centre.

Where to Find Your Product Feeds in Woocommerce

So, with the above checked off, you want to log into the backend of your website. In the left sidebar menu, click Woocommerce and then Product Feeds. Here, you should find your primary product feed listed.

How to Add a Google Local Product Feed in Woocommerce

Click Add New at the top of the page and add a product feed like you will (or should) have done with your primary feed, except this time you want to name it something like ‘Google merchant centre local product inventory feed’, and also select the ‘Google merchant centre local product inventory feed’ option from the drop-down list, under feed types. Here, you can also control which categories you want your product feed to pull through, if applicable, using the category filtering drop down list.

After you’ve done this, head to Settings under Woocommerce on the left sidebar and then click the Product Feeds tab on the page itself. You should find your two product feeds here, the primary one and the local inventory one, listed under active feeds.

From this page you can also control which fields you want in your feed for each product, and set store-wide defaults where necessary.

How to Set Up a Local Inventory Product Feed in Google Merchant Centre

Now that that’s set up, log in to your Google Merchant Centre account. If you own multiple Gmail accounts, make sure you’re definitely using the correct one that also has access to your other Google assets such as Google Ads and Google My Business.

Once you’re logged in, head to Products and then Feeds. Your primary feed should already be set up and be visible under the Primary feeds section here.

Under the Supplemental Feeds heading, click Add Product Inventory Feed.

Select Local Product Inventory as the type, select your country of sale and the language of the content in your feed and hit Continue.

Next, name your feed – we suggest something simple and easily identifiable such as ‘localproductinventoryfeed’ – and select the scheduled fetch option for how your product data is collected. The scheduled fetch option means that the feed you have set up on your website will automatically feed into to Google Merchant Centre at a scheduled interval with any updated product data.

On the next page, you can name your feed file (we suggest using the same name as on the previous page to avoid any confusion) and set the frequency in which the data is fetched and at what time. We’d recommend keeping the default settings of a daily scheduled fetch at midnight, however whatever works best for you and your business is of course the best option.

In the file URL box, simply copy and paste the URL listed in the backend of your website next to your  local product inventory feed. It should look something like your domain name, followed by /woocommerce_gpf/, followed by a series of letters and numbers.

Press the Create product inventory feed to complete the feed set-up. Once that’s set up, you should see it listed under Supplemental feeds.

Click into your local inventory feed via Products > Feeds and press Fetch Now in the top right hand corner to start your feed being processed. It can sometimes take some time to process, especially if you have a lot of products available in your store, so give it some time to do its thing.

Once your local inventory feed is set up and approved, make yourself a cuppa and give yourself a pat on the back – you’ve done it! From here, you can now begin to set up your business’s free local listings. To find out how to set up Google free local listings, including what to expect from a Google inventory self-verification survey, head to our blog here and we’ll walk you through it.

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