Google Merchant Center is changing its name to Merchant Center Next.

With an announcement initially made at the start of 2024, the change is now being rolled out across thousands of accounts.

In this update we’ll share our experience with the new platform, along with providing tips and insights to help you with the transition. 

You don’t have to switch (yet)

While it is being rolled out, it’s important to know that you can switch back to classic Merchant Center (and yes, it’s infuriating having to spell center like that here in the UK…). This is important because Merchant Center Next is still in beta, and there may be key functionalities absent that are essential to advertisers like ourselves (more on that later).

If you find yourself needing to revert back to classic Merchant Center, simply navigate to the help icon in the top right of your screen.

Press the ‘?’ icon and scroll down to the bottom of the menu. Then press ‘Use Classic Merchant Center’.

This will allow you to easily return to the old Merchant Center. Don’t worry, you can always upgrade to Merchant Center Next later, if circumstances change. 

As with all updates to Google’s platforms, they remain optional for a long period, but we anticipate that this will become the norm soon, and classic Merchant Center will likely be sunsetted.

That being said, we recommend getting to grips with the new interface and getting a head start.

So, what’s missing in Merchant Center Next?

By far the biggest issue currently with many Merchant Center Next accounts is an inability to add supplemental feeds.

This is a huge problem, as many advertisers use supplemental feeds in order to organise the best-performing products within our feeds for use in Google shopping ads.

However, you can work around this issue by reverting to classic Merchant Center, then adding your supplemental feeds as you would have normally.

It just means there’s now friction to do so. 

Hopefully, Google is not thinking of removing the advertisers’ ability to create supplemental feeds in the future, as this would cause major issues with inventory management.

However, please be aware that this is only the case with some accounts. We manage Merchant Center Next accounts that do have this functionality, meaning that it is likely to simply be an issue with rollouts.

Another missing convenient feature is the ‘feeds’ section, which has been moved. We have seen many advertisers having the same issue; not being able to find their data sources for their products.

To find your feeds in Merchant Center Next, simply navigate to Products on the left, then press on the text that says ‘View data sources’.

What’s new?

Aside from the new UI and temporarily missing features, the biggest change with Merchant Center Next is its ability to automatically crawl your website and pull products in without a feed.

This is a big deal, as it means advertisers who are not familiar with API integration/setup can automatically pull their products into Google Merchant Center. 

That means no more manual spreadsheet updates whenever you run out of stock or need to adjust your prices.

You can find this in the products section and under ‘More found by Google’.

You may be worried that this change could have an impact on your advertising, if you only want to advertise certain products that you have manually uploaded and not your whole inventory. 

Don’t worry though, these products scraped by Google do not automatically enter your shopping campaigns and will only be available for free listings unless you allow Google to use them in ads.

If you want to stop Google scraping your site for products to pull into Merchant Center Next, then you can easily disable this feature. 

Simply go to ‘View data sources’, then under ‘Found by Google’ you should see your website and the number of products found.

Then, press the three-dotted menu to the right and select ‘Hide all automatically found products’. 

The new Product Studio

Of course AI was going to make an appearance in the new Merchant Center Next, here in the form of Product Studio. 

Now you can easily test different creatives on Google Shopping by changing backgrounds of your products to create lifestyle imagery.

This new feature uses AI to help generate scenes based on prompts. You can either write your own scene prompt or use Google’s pre-made suggestions.

It will be interesting to test this new feature and compare it to traditional product images with white backgrounds to see which creative generates a higher click through rate.

As this is a new AI-powered feature, it’s likely that many of the background images generated may look a bit odd, so we recommend testing this feature first before using it on all your products.

Beginner-friendly features

Overall the new Merchant Center Next has made the platform more beginner-friendly, allowing advertisers unfamiliar with feed management to easily pull products from their website without API knowledge or the need to pay for content API plugins.

However, existing advertisers may need to refamiliarise themselves with the new interface. But overall, the change shouldn't have much impact on current products feed setups for your Google shopping ads. 

If you would like to know more about Merchant Center Next or need help with managing your product feed in Google ads, please get in touch with Ascensor’s paid advertising experts.