The Google Shopping Feed is different than the Product Feed you provide us because your Product Feed should be a complete list of all of the products you sell on your site whereas the Google Shopping Feed will only contain the products you're paying ads for in Google.
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According to Google, a feed is a file made up of a list of products that use groupings of attributes that define each one of your products uniquely. It also says on their help center that a primary feed is the required data source that Merchant Center uses to display your products on Google.

You can find out how to make a Google Shopping Feed here.

We need both your Product Feed and Google Shopping Feed to match. Anytime a customer leaves a Product Review, it attaches to the specific product in your Product Feed, which in turn talks to Google through your Google Shopping Feed. This allows the stars from the customer's review to aggregate in your PLA.

Here at Shopper Approved, we make sure that the Product Feed you provide to us mirrors your Google Shopping Feed, which is an advantage we have over our competitors. We take the time and dedication to make sure this works. 

See here for product feeds explained

When it comes to both of these feeds, there are limitations that you need to be aware of.

There are three main items in your Google Shopping Feed and product feed for Shopper Approved that are considered as strong identifiers: MPN (Manufacturer Part Number), Brand, and GTIN (Global Trade Item Number). All three of these play a main part in the connection between the two feeds and how reviews are syndicated. The limitations of these three identifiers will determine if your stars will show in your Product Listing Ads (PLAs).

MPN and Brand - These two are considered the “best friends” of the identifiers. If you have a feed that contains one of the identifiers and not the other, there will be no connection made to the products you have in Google. Therefore, your reviews cannot be syndicated and stars will not show in your PLAs. You would need both identifiers to ensure there is a connection for reviews to syndicate.

GTIN - This identifier is the one identifier that can stand alone. This is a number that is completely unique to the product it represents and there will never be two of the same GTIN’s on the internet. If you have this number, you generally do not need to have a MPN or Brand.
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You can go one of three ways when it comes to these three identifiers:

The most common problem users might run into is if the feed isn’t configured properly. For example, the image URL could be missing or we may have an MPN or brand, but not both. 

If you run into any issues with creating a Product Feed, matching it to your Google Shopping Feed, or uploading it to your Shopper Approved dashboard, please reach out to us! You can reach out directly to [email protected], and we'll work with you to resolve your issue.
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