Global E-commerce's Strongest Free Traffic? How to Open a Free Store on Google Shopping and Sell Globally! (Part 1)

What is Google Shopping? What is Google Merchant Center?

Google Shopping is Google's Marketplace and one of the world's largest marketplaces, supporting 70+ countries and markets—its scale needs no elaboration.

From User Experience Perspective

Google Shopping owns the world's largest search engine with top-tier resource placement in Google Search, bringing massive and precise traffic to sellers.

As shown below, when users search for relevant product intent keywords, the red box shows Google Shopping Ads—see how prominent the placement is; and it's more vivid than regular text-only Google Search Ads (with images and product info).

Also, as indicated by the red arrow, Google Shopping has its own channel page entry, making it easy for users to click into the Google Shopping channel to find more products.

From Merchant Experience Perspective

The merchant-side product of Google Shopping is called Google Merchant Center (GMC). Sellers need to establish stores, upload products, complete information, and monitor performance through GMC.

At the same time, GMC is the most basic element of Google Shopping Ads, or rather, due to the deep integration between GMC and Google Ads, sellers can one-click bind stores and products in Google Ads, easily creating shopping ads to quickly obtain precise traffic.

Moreover, compared to Amazon and other shopping platforms, Google Shopping is more merchant-friendly, broader and more inclusive—for example, free product listings, fewer restrictions, etc. (all前提 is compliance with rules).

GMC Four Major Advantages

In short, GMC (or Google Shopping) is one of the most important traffic and conversion acquisition channels for global e-commerce independent site players. Lvsao summarizes GMC's four major advantages:

1. Absolutely precise traffic compared to social media
2. Absolutely top traffic compared to other search engines
3. Relatively friendly compared to other MarketPlaces
4. Perfect integration with Google ecosystem, can be used with Google Ads, Google Analytics

(Google please pay me)

Currently Google Shopping supports Free Listing in 79 country markets, and Google Shopping Ads in 54 country markets.

What is Product Feed?

After creating a GMC account, the primary task is to create a Product Feed—essentially listing products, but GMC calls this action uploading a Feed (just like Amazon/Etsy likes to call it Product Listing).

Feeds are divided into:

• Primary Feed (main, required): The main data source for GMC product catalog
• Supplemental Feed (supplementary, optional): Allows sellers to achieve more custom optimization

4 Ways to Upload Primary Feed

Among them, Content API is a method that Shopify users will inevitably use—Shopify and GMC connect through API as partners, helping merchants automatically sync Shopify products to GMC.

This helps merchants save worry and effort. But unfortunately, both GMC and Shopify clearly state: Content API can only be used once.

So this creates problems for many who want to expand to multiple country markets—how do I generate feeds for more country markets to conquer the global market?

How to Upload Product Feeds for Multiple Country Markets?

Method-wise, as mentioned above, although Content API can only be used once, don't forget GMC still provides other ways to upload product feeds.

Currently I mainly rely on two methods:

1. Manual Google Sheet (Main focus of this article)

Pros:

• Completely free
• Can optimize product information more finely

Cons:

• Huge hassle
• Doesn't support automatic updates, requires manual maintenance (e.g., new products, price changes)

Suitable for: Perfect for boutique and stable solopreneurs with few but refined products.

2. Feed File Generated by Plugin (Main focus of next article)

Pros:

• Plugins can quickly batch generate feeds for all products across multiple country markets
• Supports regular automatic updates to crawl your Shopify product data

Cons:

• Plugin fees
• Although some plugins offer certain customization, if you pursue extreme product optimization, you'll still need to establish supplemental feeds later to supplement other personalized product information

Suitable for: Everyone

How to Upload Product Primary Feed Using Google Sheet?

Basic Version: Pure Manual!

Step 1: Select your target market country and target language, and set a label name (recommend using country abbreviation)

Step 2: Name your feed and select Google Sheets

Step 3: Choose to create a brand new sheet or based on your existing Google Sheet file

Step 4: Edit product information one by one

Lvsao Plus Secret Version: One-click Export Existing Content API Data!

This method applies to same-language multiple countries situations, for example if you mainly do US and want to expand to European English-speaking countries.