Google Product Feed (WooCommerce plugin, Ademti)

The Google Product Feed plugin is developed by a company called Ademti, and sold through WooCommerce [1]. It's probably the closest thing to a 'native WooCommerce product feed plugin'.

My first impression (2022.10) is one of dissapointment: It seems quite limited, compaired to Product Feed Pro (AdTribes) that we used before. A customization that we usually need, is to replace images by externally hosted images (because of logos). With Product Feed Pro, that's a piece of cake. With this plugin, it seems only possible through coding.

Navigation

After installation:

• Plugins » WooCommerce Google Product Feed
• WooCommerce » Settings » Product Feeds: General settings. Aka. main extention page
• WooCommerce » Product Feeds: Instantiated product feeds: The only thing to configure here, is to limit the output to certain category taxons. Everything else happens at the Settings screen.
• Product » All Products: At the bottom of a product page, there is an new section Product Feed Information. Here, you can overrun default values

License

This plugin is licenced under the GNU Public License 3, which means amongst others, that you are allowed to distribute it. I guess you pay for updates and support. One nice thing about this licensing: I can buy one copy and use at at multiple sites - Fully legal! I only need to take care myself about updating.

Feed refreshing

[2] Seems to suggest, that the feed is refreshed whenever a download is requested. That seems a bit too ambitious for our situation with about 17,000 products. And indeed: About an hour after updating product data, the feed was still outdated (by going to the feed-page and right-clicking on the URL » Download link).

About 3 hours later, the feed was updated - That's pretty good.

Case: Include externally hosted images (Nov. 2022)

This is about creating a feed for Google Shopping from a site with some 15,000 products.

Problem

The images on the site, all have a logo in them. That's not acceptable to Google. We do have the images without logo. They are hosted on media.example.com. The link between products and these externally hosted images, is the field sku_oem, that is included in the feed.

Approach

The GUI doesn't offer a way to include externally hosted images. However, this can be done through PHP, especially filters. Examples from the official documentation.

More specific suggestions from the producer [3]:

The primary image is in the object property 'image_link', and additional images in an array under property additional_images, see here for the filters you can use to override them:

<?php

add_filter( 'woocommerce_gpf_feed_item_google', function( $feed_item, $product ) {
    // Modify $feed_item->image_link and/or $feed_item->additional_images here.
    return $feed_item;
}, 10, 2 );

See also

• Payed Woo plugins
• Product Feed Pro (WooCommerce-plugin, AdTribes.io) - The 'other' product feed-plugin that we use. I actually like this one better, but it can't handle large volumes very well
• Wp plugin install (WP-CLI)#With URL

Sources

• https://woocommerce.com/products/google-product-feed/
• https://woocommerce.com/documentation/woocommerce-extensions/google-product-feed/
• https://woocommerce.com/document/google-product-feed-setting-up-your-feed-google-merchant-centre/
• https://woocommerce.com/document/google-product-feed-setting-product-data/ - Custom fields (like external images) are possible, but need to be programmed.