Bulk Addition of GTINS within Merchant Centre using supplemental feeds

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Hi All.

Wix does not appear to fully support GTINS with the google merchant centre plugin.
This isn’t suitable, as in Australia this is required for merchant centre to display products correctly.
I understand that you can manually add a GTIN for a product within merchant centre, but we have approximately 5000 or more items, so this is not suitable.
There is a method where you can add a supplemental data source within merchant center, to add the GTINS (supplemental source, google sheet, copy the item ID from the already imported products, then add the GTIN column also) - then update.
The issue is, products already within WIX are assigned an item number, which is fine.
But the order in which they are present in the exported product list from merchant center (prior to creation of the supplemental google sheet feed), is different than the order in which our original datafeed from the distributor is formatted.
So basically, we are unable to copy the barcode/GTIN column from our original data feed, to import into the downloaded product list from merchant center (we would still have to do each one individually). If that makes sense…

So i figured that instead of connecting WIX with merchant center, we could just format our original data file, into the same format as the merchant center format, and import.
But the issue then, is that WIX provides the item numbers to merchant center, and we would also have to add a link for each product, to each specific landing page for each specific item, which is unsuitable.

My question is, has anybody successfully synced their large product catalogue with merchant centre, and been able to also supplement the GTINS, whilst having WIX provide the relevant ID and landing page information?

The fact that WIX doesn’t handle barcodes is kind of silly, but it works for everything else fine.

Currently the process is this:
Download datafeed from distributor
Use a python script to reformat the feed into WIX format, and split the file in 2 .csv files
Import all products into wix - WIX working normally
Connect google sales channel and list all the products - which all are approved.
Within merchant center - all items are appearing as “showing on google, free ads and shopping”
But all items also are missing the GTIN, because it is not imported into the WIX feed when it is created and imported. (hence they are not optimised for merchant center, and give the GTIN error)

It appears that the only data columns required for merchant centre supplemental feed are the ID, and barcode. But as mentioned earlier, we can export the product list from merchant center, but are unable to match barcodes from our original distributor data feed, as the items are in a different order, causing us to be unable to create the supplemental data feed without doing each item individually. Which cannot be done.

Absolute Headache!
If anyone has any relevant information, it would be much appreciated!
Thank you!
Mobile Wizard

2

Hi All,

Further to this - we have found the following.

In our case, when using the WIX plugin for google merchant center, items imported were given an item id of random string numbers when imported into merchant center. Which would cause an issue when attempting to create and use a supplemental feed, because we were unable to match product id’s with gtins (because of our original data feed from our distributor being in a different arrangement, ie: cells in different orders) Specifically, we had no way to copy and paste cells in the supplemental feed, because they would end up being out of order compared to the other data in the merchant center data file.

We overcame that specific hurdle by using google shopping by simprosys (an app within wix app market) - that allowed us to connect to merchant center, sync products - which would then be given an item id similar to our SKU instead of a random number string.
Then, we removed the WIX data source api from sources, using simprosys created one instead, (this is to avoid duplicated items from WIX plugin and Simprosys, effectively doubling the amount of products in merchant center) and added a supplemental feed, with additions for “item ID” (being our SKU from original data feed from distributor) and the GTIN for each product line. (This process was basically cut and paste relevant cells - SKU - ItemID, GTIN - GTIN) - you can also modify other data during the same process - for us we only had a problem with merchant center not having GTINS.

The specific cause of the problem, is WIX plugin for merchant centre didn’t support the migration of a GTIN field for items. Wix doesn’t really do barcoding much) This is also reflected in the product info field when editing a product. The issue was really because of us needing to update GTINS in bulk, from a data feed in different format to google merchant center, because products have already been imported. We could have reversed the process, buy exporting merchant center data feed, and modifying - but then we would encounter the problem of having to edit other cells, due to them also being in a different arrangement to the original data feed.

I assume there is a more basic way to do this, with less products it is easier. For us, it was more about being able to use an alternative way to get data into merchant center to keep the google ad functionality working correctly. GTINS are mostly required here in Australia for ads to have any functionality at all. For users with hundreds or thousand of products, manual modification of each product for addition of a GTIN in merchant center might not be suitable for all users.

To summarise - Simprosys App could potentially be a better alternative to using only the WIX merchant center plugin, as it is more compatible technically, for advanced use, especially for Ad functionality. (For us, this actually resolved having around 7500 items not showing ads, reducing that number to 1000, and those are actually genuine issues with products (we don’t have gtins for some, and others have different minor issues affecting ads) with just over 6500 resolved and now working. They also had some really good screenshot help tutorials relating the the setup and configuration - We managed to get it working correctly the first attempt, so we were happy to install the app and have success. It also appears to be free, which was even better.

Supplemental feeds are the easiest way to add data to the merchant centre products in bulk, if required - using google sheets method only requires adding the itemID (which must match the same ItemID in the current merchant center set) and whichever field and data you need to modify. Google sheet supplemental feed method supplies you with a template during the process, showing you the format required to correctly import)

Hopefully this might help somebody currently pulling their hair out trying to modify GTINS in bulk!