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By hand, with a file, or with a spreadsheet: how your catalog gets into Merchant Center

You'll learn how to add your catalog to Merchant Center yourself, one product at a time, with a file, or with a spreadsheet, and which one works best for you so it never goes stale.

By Yodai · Published September 6, 2026 · Updated October 12, 2026

You search "flower delivery" on Google, and right at the top, before the regular results, there's a row of photos with the price under each one, and the Shopping tab shows a lot more. You have a flower shop, you have a website, you have a catalog. And you're not showing up there. The question isn't whether your business deserves to be there. It's how a product gets into that row, and who's in charge of sending it.

The safe route is to hand it over yourself: you add your catalog to Merchant Center, product by product or with a file that lists each product, its price, and its availability, and you keep it up to date. The ways of delivering it aren't interchangeable: each one asks for different upkeep, and a catalog that isn't maintained ends up showing old prices or products you don't carry anymore, which Google can reject.

Merchant Center's two doors

Merchant Center is where Google stores your catalog before deciding whether to show it in Shopping. You don't publish a polished listing there: you send raw data, row by row, and Google builds the listing from what you give it. This lesson is about where that data comes from.

If you only have a few products, you can add them one at a time right in Merchant Center, filling out a form for each one. Google only allows this once the account already has at least one product: the first time around, it requires a file or a Google Sheet, and the form is there afterward for adding or fixing things.

For everything else, you're the messenger with a file. You put together a file with one row per product and a fixed set of columns: ID, title, description, price, availability, link to the product page, link to the photo. That file is the feed, and you hand it to Merchant Center to read.

Inside the feed: by hand, in a spreadsheet, or scheduled

Choosing the feed doesn't settle the decision. Within the feed there are three ways to deliver it, and the one that fits you depends on how often your price and stock change.

The simplest option is uploading a CSV file by hand, from your computer, every time something changes. It works fine for a short, stable catalog: twenty or thirty products whose prices don't change more than once a month. The trouble comes if you forget to upload it. Google sticks with the data from last time, and if it doesn't match what you're actually charging on your site, it can reject the product until you fix it.

The second option is a Google Sheet that Merchant Center reads on its own every 24 hours. You don't need to know how to code. Merchant Center gives you a template, you fill it in like a regular table, and whatever you change gets picked up by Google on the next read. It's the option I recommend most for a small business: it keeps the feed current without asking you to learn anything new.

The third option is a URL that your website generates on its own with up-to-date data, and that Merchant Center downloads every 24 hours. It takes someone to build it once, a developer, or whatever tool you used to build your site, if it generates that URL for you, but after that you never touch it again. It's the most solid choice once your catalog passes a hundred items and the price or stock changes every week.

The sheet solves the how. But it doesn't decide what goes in: you have items with a set price and real stock, and others, like the ones you make to order or that take three weeks to arrive, that you can't vouch for the same way yet, and that difference is what decides which listings you send to Shopping and which ones you keep on your website only.