Google & YouTube

Even if your store runs in USD do not waste your time with this app it is a complete mess. We were running successful Google Shopping campaigns with the old Google Shopping app but were forced to upgrade to this new one. Almost all our valid UPC numbers were being reported as not valid gtin numbers after the switch. Shopify support said they must not be valid, but some were working while others not but all UPC numbers were purchased in the same batch. We provided proof of the actual UPC scans to show they were entered correctly but Shopify still says the problem is on our end. Going to switch to a different feed app and see what happens then, will update this review with the results.

June 9th update: We installed the Google Shopping feed app from Adwords Robot and everything is working great again. Nothing changed on our end so our UPC numbers were not invalid as reported by the Shopify Google Shopping app. Really disappointed with Shopify support in regards to this app, they are usually great but in this case they either couldn't or wouldn't address the real problem and forced us to find a different solution. Maybe this app works correctly when you're starting a new store but it definitely did not work for us.

I'm sorry Shopify.... I rarely ever write reviews here, but this app is astonishingly bad.

Update 6/14/18
The channel feeds your "shipping" rates to Google Merchant Center. It is supposed to feed the lowest rate to GMC, but it does not, it feeds the highest rate. In my case it is feeding Priority Mail Express. This means that shoppers on Google will think that all your products are super expensive to ship because they will not be shown your default shipping rate, which is usually the lowest rate available for whatever service you are using. If you edit the shipping data in GMC, Shopify will simply push the higher rate again and it will overwrite your correction.

I just deleted this channel and started using a paid app. All of the new products that were added to my shop while this channel was running, have now lost all the Google product data that had been entered.

Original Review

The previous version was extremely basic and not easy to use, but what little useful functionality it had, has been completely removed from the new version. Here's a list of issues to save yourself the time and pain I just went though, there may be more issues than this, I just haven't encountered them yet.

New app creates a "Channel" and is not really an App. It does not appear in the Apps section on your dashboard.

It does not save product categories, custom product status, gender, age, or condition. I think it actually reset all the conditions to "new" regardless of their previous setting. I don't use MPC or UPC so I don't know what happens to those.

The old dropdown list of categories is gone, so you must know the full path to the category and manually type it in. There is a handy link to Google's help page explaining categories, and from there another link to an excel or text file download where you can manually search for your category, then copy/paste the string of text to the Shopify screen. I have nearly 3000 products, so I was forced to pay $30 for another app to do true bulk editing. The 3rd party app process to fix the missing data for category, custom product status, age, and gender, and condition, took six hours to run because each of those data points had to be updated separately across 3000 products.

They removed the Search function from within the Channel/App. It just shows the same tabs of the first 25 of your products in pending, rejected, published status, with forward/back arrows to scroll through the products. If you know a particular product has an issue, you can't find it within the Channel/App. You have to go to the general products area, search for it, then go to the "More" link at the top of the products screen, then click Google Shopping Data, then a window pops up with the data. This also means that for each new product added to your shop, you will have to remember to save it, then go to the More link and open the Google Shopping data popup to add the info.

The Channel/App screens are sorted by oldest product first, which, if your store is selling well, are probably sold out products anyway. From the Channel, if you select multiple products and then click Actions > Edit you are taken to a standard Shopify Bulk Edit screen where you can add or remove columns, but you cannot sort by the columns, so if you have a mix of data and want only to fix the ones that are wrong, you have to scroll down and do them one at a time. The previous method of bulk editing at least provided you with a way to select multiple items in the list and then select a data point from a dropdown and change it to the new data.

The Channel/App screens update the product status painfully slow. Google Merchant Center showed products were submitted and approved long before the channel said they were, the channel kept showing Pending on products that were already approved. For several days GMC showed a different set of "rejected" products than the channel showed. Right this minute, GMC shows 10 products disapproved, Shopify shows 0 rejected. Shopify shows 4 items pending, GMC shows 0 pending. Shopify never shows the total number of approved (or even total submitted) products so you will never really know if the numbers match what GMC says you have submitted and/or approved.

The functionality to re-publish products to Google whenever you want has been removed. Now products only re-publish if the channel detects something has changed on the product.

This app says that my products are approved for Google Shopping but when I opened my Google Merchant Account, it has been disapproved. They do not show the same data. I've gone back and forth trying to fix things and this Shopify app keeps saying it's approved and the merchant account keeps saying its not. It is a scary app to use because it makes you think that your products are all okay and showing in Google Shopping but it's not - it looks like a cover-up for a bad job with creating the app.

App is useless. There is no way to bulk edit the google shopping fields. When you export products, the google shopping info is not included and when you import the csv, the google shopping data does not upload. I notified Shopify of this back in April and still no resolution. When you have 1000's of products, manually adding the google shopping data would take weeks. Shopify needs to remove this app until they have it fixed.

Disappointing. Introduced to market before ready to be a valuable app

Shopify stopped using the data from the Google Shopping columns for importing/exporting yet still allows exports, imports and updates of the same data without letting you know that Shopify ignores it for your merchant feed. Wasted days of updating product data before finding out that you have to add/edit everything separately in the Google Shopping channel. As a result - even with the Google Shopping Channel bulk editor -- it becomes a clunky and inefficient process to input data. If you have a lot of products, and want to sell on Google Shopping, be prepared to be very disappointed.

Support was of no help and sheepishly declined to have a manager call me after I asked several times for a phone call. He will "speak" to me over email.

Straight up negligent development as you can probably tell by the barrage of 1 star reviews in the timeline. Shopify does a great job providing a dull tool every business needs to fail. Marketing in Google Shopping is a necessity. What a disaster.

used to work great for Australian stores (and still does) except they won't let more Australian stores sign up if they're not in USD

Products do not sync and I'm unable to see any error messaging or retrigger and upload

Don't use this app. It will submit the highest shipping cost (instead of the lowest) to Google. Your product will cost $25 and it will tell Google the shipping will be $75. Nobody will buy your product when they see you charge $75 for shipping.

Shopify really needs to get its act together on this one!

Not working. Need support for different currency!