Google & YouTube

Stupidly I deleted the old version of Google Shopping -- which WAS WORKING -- and installed this new version.

This new version connects to my Google account, but then thinks that it doesn't have authorization (which it does) so it doesn't allow the account to be configured -- even though it's pulled the info.

Google Shopping / Shopify -- please fix your apps so they are working. It's holiday shopping season. It's bad time of year to mess up a shopping application that was working.

UPDATE - after a reply where they said "they understood how frustrating this was" - still no solution. Do please check your accounts before setting up this or disabling previous apps.

Dear Michael

With the greatest respect I don't think you do "understand how frustrating this is for my business " it is costing me money every day.

All my google ads have ceased to run and sales have plummeted. I am more than frustrated, your teams lack of due diligence before implementing an app that you encouraged peole onto without necessary signage or research costs sales.

I have now split my google accounts apart, had to reset up both accounts, using one store under a new gmail account. However one store still says "Cannot connect to Google Account" and the other store it is forcing me to set up a new Google Ads account as opposed to adding my existing google ads account where my ads and all that data is currently.

It strikes me you were clearly partnering Google in this to drive people to set up new Google Ads accounts, but you were not for one second considering the huge swathes of users who will already have Google ads accounts and have any degree of complexity to their setup outside of the basic user you want to upsell google services to. It behoves your team to work out how on earth people like me and all the other deeply frustrated users can reintegrate with Google without having to destroy our existing setups to fir around the code asap.

1, Why on earth could we not simply input a pre-existing merchant account number on setup
2, why can we not just input our Google ads number.

Keep the default options for the new customers, but at least think about user flow and progress for others.

Now how do I resolve getting my new stand alone Merchant account on to my Google Ads account. Google has made a point of allowing users to merge and combine accounts, so Google Merchant Centre can be multi-client as can Google Adwords. How come this was totally overlooked.

I appreciate this is not actually your fault directly and obviously this is not personal, but this all needs addressing as a matter of urgency. Christmas is approaching, it is peak sales period and now both my channels cannot serve ads directly because of this.

Oct 31, 10:21 EDT

Michael here from the Shopify Guru Team!

I have taken a look at your previous conversations with Aisling and they are correct in stating that splitting your Google Merchant Center account could work, as it would make you have the two separate accounts for each respective domain. In the case of being able to revert back to an old version of the app, this is not possible as the Google Shopping channel is new all together.

I understand how frustrating this is for your business and I want our team to hear you out on this situation. As we have created this app, I will make a request to the correct team to consider putting functionality for Multi Client Accounts in future updates to our app. While I cannot guarantee that this change will come down from us any time soon, I am sure that you are not the only merchant who would like to have this functionality.

Going forward I will submit a feature request to our team as a "Merchant Frustration" and if our team does have any questions about this, they will be in touch for further information.

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Damn you Shopify - my feed was working fine with the old system. You promoted updating to the NEW app and said the old was unsupported. NOWHERE did you say you don't support Multi Client accounts. So now you say either I have to completely separate my Google Merchant accounts and therefore split my Ads admin. This then means the feed dones't work, we can't advertise on Google Shopping and sales have completely stopped. PLEASE SORT IT OUT. The reason we move to SHopify is for ease of use. Small businesses don't have the time to arse about cleaning up your problems when you don't bug check and test products properly. Dam it I'm angry. Been on the phone to India with google who are even more useless.

Complete crap! don't install it!

You do not get ANY options whatsoever to try and do anything with your ads

I was forced to update to this new app as Shopify told me the old one was to be unsupported.

I now cannot import my shipping rates as I'm in the UK so I'm stuck and my Google traffic has plummeted.

Terrible experience, I only hope I can delete this app and get back to my ususal search traffic.

Hope this review helps someone make a better decision when choosing how to sync to Google.

This app is meant for new small merchants just getting started or merchants not yet setup with Merchant Center or Ads.

Beware if you are an established merchant:
- This app will change all product ID's to XXXXX-XXXXX and make it incredibly difficult to run ad campaigns for certain products as you will need to match the ID to your SKU. Impossible if you have hundreds or thousands of SKUs.
- If you have approved products you will need to re-sync your catalog. This will cause all of your SKUs to go thorough the approval process again. In many cases you will need to wait weeks to get items approved again.
- If you use a shipping app like Boxify to set your shipping settings this app will not import settings outside of Shopify's shipping settings.
- If you have manually configured shipping settings on Merchant Center, all settings will be deleted every-time the app syncs.
- Google Shopping Fields will need to be set one item at a time as there is no excel upload feature that I could find.

There is no support for this app, they blame everything on google. I was told that google doesn't have a way for them to not overwrite the shipping settings... yet all the other apps on the marketplace are allowed to do this.

Developer Suggestion:
1) Don't send the shipping settings to Google, let users set their own shipping rules.
2) Send SKU# or add SKU# to item ID (ItemID-SKU) to allow better control on the Google ads side.

Conclusion:
This app works fine if you don't mind manual work. If you are busy and are trying to grow your business this app will slow you down. If you have a store with 100 items or less or not using a shipping app like Boxify then this app will probably work fine for you.

Issues like this makes us think that upgrading to Shopify Plus might not be worth it. To many apps needed to run a store, little to no support for free Shopify apps, or the apps are useless for larger growing merchants.

I give it a minus 10 not even good enough for a zero!!! It's a destructive app!!! DON'T INSTALL IT! It will ruin your google merchant account and take approved products to disapproved and it will take hours to fix little errors.

Also you don't have access to fix those either... So you're stuck.

STOP NOW! AND GET RID OF THE APP! I'd like to know who created it and if there could be legal action against them for lost income by all of these amazing store owners. I would say that the developer is liable for these financial losses and should be held accountable.

It actually seems like a scam. It has spent over half our ad spend to date on advertising to people whom canot buy from us despite adding a location. It gives no control and is bug ridden from start to finish. It's actually hard to believe just how bad this app is. Shopify is this a scam?

It works like a charm and the ROI ist very good. It's the best way to easily make money without having to pay an agency. Great job, thank you.

Let me start by saying, DO NOT INSTALL THIS APP. I am a Shopify Plus store and a "Guru" convinced me it was perfectly fine to install the app despite the negative reviews. I was told these negative reviews were people that didn't understand Google's strict Shopping rules. I have been doing this for many years and I understand fully, and this negative review has NOTHING to do with Google.

Shopify unfortunately does not give you the tools necessary to add back in all the Google Shopping data fields that were previously available via a simple csv file. You have to manually edit each item. Seriously?!?! Each item, Shopify? I have a couple thousand items. This is absolutely impossible.

You have to manually add in the MPN, product category, and condition for each individual item, and there's no way to do it with a csv file. You can't even search for the items to edit. You literally have to scroll 25 items at a time to find an item or a group of items. It's a total disaster!

People, you have been warned. Unless you are a very small beginner store, this app will wreck your Google Shopping campaign.

after 4 days, no sales, and a bill of $229.00 from google.. only 65 clicks, after spending about 9 hours on this total.. 8 of those hours was wondering how to control cpc which is apparently impossible.. this tool will bankrupt you before you even know it

the old app was horrible, but it worked at least and we were spending $5 a day for 5-10 sales a day.