Get Your Products into Google Shopping for Free
There is a free way to get your products showing in Google Shopping. Most small shops never look into it, because Shopping looks like advertising and advertising costs money.
Google opened Shopping up to free listings a few years back. Paid listings still exist and still sit in the most prominent positions, but underneath and alongside them there are free ones, and getting into those costs you nothing but the effort of sending your product data in the right shape.
You create a Google Merchant Centre account, and you give it a feed. A feed is a structured list of everything you sell: title, description, price, availability, image, a link to the product page, and some identifiers.
That is the whole idea. You are handing Google a tidy catalogue instead of hoping it works your shop out by crawling it.
Most shop platforms can generate this automatically. WooCommerce and Shopify both have ways to do it. Our CMS builds and maintains the feed for you, which was the point of building the shop natively.
Getting listed is easy. Getting listed well depends entirely on the quality of what you send, and this is where most shops lose.
Titles. Your product is called "The Ashcombe" on your site because that is your range name. Nobody searches for that. The title in the feed should read the way a customer would describe it: brand, product type, then the distinguishing details. "Ashcombe oak dining table, 6 seat, natural" beats "The Ashcombe" every time. Your on-site name can stay as it is, the feed title is a separate field.
Identifiers. GTINs are the barcode numbers that identify a product globally. If you resell things other people manufacture, you almost certainly have them and are not sending them. Products with GTINs get matched to searches far more reliably. If you make your own products, you say so with a flag and it is fine.
Availability and price. These have to be accurate and current. Google checks against your product page, and if the feed says £40 in stock while the page says £45 sold out, you get suspended rather than corrected. Automatic feeds handle this. Spreadsheets uploaded once a quarter do not.
Images. Plain background, product filling most of the frame, no promotional text or watermarks burned in. Google rejects overlays, and "20% OFF" splashed across the corner is the most common reason for a rejected image.
Descriptions. Write them for a person. Google reads them for context, so the details somebody would ask about (material, size, fit, compatibility) do real work.
There is a second reason to do this that has nothing to do with Shopping.
A clean, structured, accurate product feed is machine-readable information about what you sell. That is the same thing AI assistants are reaching for when someone asks them to find a product. Sorting out your feed is not only a Shopping exercise, it is general legibility for anything trying to understand your catalogue without a human reading it.
We have written before about showing up in AI search as well as Google. Product data is the version of that argument for shops, and it is more concrete than most of it.
Get the Merchant Centre account and verify your website. Connect an automatic feed from your shop platform instead of uploading a file. Fix whatever it complains about, because it will complain and the complaints are specific and fixable. Then improve titles across your best sellers first, since that is where the effort pays back.
It is an afternoon to set up and an hour or two of tidying. There is no ongoing cost.
If your shop is not sending a feed, or is sending one Google keeps rejecting, we can sort it out. Get in touch and we will take a look at what is going over.
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