In order to show customers which local products can be found in nearby stores, Google matches data across different sources: Business Profiles, the product data, and the local inventory data in Merchant Center.
About matching
The key links between all of your data submissions are your product identifiers and your store codes. These attributes must be consistent across all of your data sources.
As a starting point, we grab the unique ID for a product that matches a customer’s search query.
Using the product ID, we match product information from the product data with the inventory information from the local inventory data. Then, we use your store code [store code] attribute from the local inventory data and match it against the Business Profiles from the linked business group to gather information about the store where that product is sold.
|
Data source 1... |
...connects to data source 2... |
...via... |
...in order to... |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product data | Local inventory data |
ID |
Identify which products are available in each of your stores |
|
Local inventory data |
Business Profiles within the linked business group |
Store code |
Capture information about the store where a product is available, like hours and location |