Manage Merchant Center email notifications

This guide explains how to use the EmailPreferences resource to manage your Merchant Center email notifications, and see which types of emails your account's users receive. For the full list of email notification types, see the EmailPreferences reference.

You can only use the Merchant API to manage email notifications for accounts where you're added as a user.

To view or update email notifications, you need the following values:

• The email address of the user that receives the emails. You can find their email address in the name field of the User resource.
• The merchant ID of the account to start or stop receiving emails about. If the merchant account is an advanced account, and the user has access to the advanced account, use the merchant ID of the advanced account.

Opt in or out of notifications

To update the email notification settings for a specific merchant account, call accounts.v1beta.accounts.users.updateEmailPreferences with the ACCOUNT_ID of the account and the email address of the user.

Use the following values to control the email notifications the user receives:

• OPTED_IN: Receive email notifications for the account.
• OPTED_OUT: Don't receive email notifications for the account.

Here's a sample request to opt a user out of email notifications for a specific merchant account:

PATCH https://merchantapi.googleapis.com/accounts/v1beta/accounts/ACCOUNT_ID/users/EMAIL_ADDRESS/emailPreferences

{
  "newsAndTips": "OPTED_OUT"
}

To retrieve the email preferences for a particular user, you can use the google.shopping.merchant.accounts.v1beta.UpdateEmailPreferencesRequest method, as shown in the following sample.

Java

  public static void updateEmailPreferences(Config config, String email) throws Exception {

    GoogleCredentials credential = new Authenticator().authenticate();

    EmailPreferencesServiceSettings emailPreferencesServiceSettings =
        EmailPreferencesServiceSettings.newBuilder()
            .setCredentialsProvider(FixedCredentialsProvider.create(credential))
            .build();

    // Creates EmailPreferences name to identify EmailPreferences.
    String name =
        EmailPreferencesName.newBuilder()
            .setAccount(config.getAccountId().toString())
            .setEmail(email)
            .build()
            .toString();

    // Create a EmailPreferences with the updated fields.
    EmailPreferences emailPreferences =
        EmailPreferences.newBuilder().setName(name).setNewsAndTips(OptInState.OPTED_IN).build();

    FieldMask fieldMask = FieldMask.newBuilder().addPaths("news_and_tips").build();

    try (EmailPreferencesServiceClient emailPreferencesServiceClient =
        EmailPreferencesServiceClient.create(emailPreferencesServiceSettings)) {

      UpdateEmailPreferencesRequest request =
          UpdateEmailPreferencesRequest.newBuilder()
              .setEmailPreferences(emailPreferences)
              .setUpdateMask(fieldMask)
              .build();

      System.out.println("Sending Update EmailPreferences request");
      EmailPreferences response = emailPreferencesServiceClient.updateEmailPreferences(request);
      System.out.println("Updated EmailPreferences Name below");
      System.out.println(response.getName());
    } catch (Exception e) {
      System.out.println(e);
    }
  }
UpdateEmailPreferencesSample.java

View existing notifications

To see the current email notification settings for a specific user, call accounts.v1beta.accounts.users.getEmailPreferences.

Here's a sample request, where the ACCOUNT_ID is the merchant ID of the account the email notifications are about, and the EMAIL_ADDRESS is the email address of the user that receives the emails.

GET https://merchantapi.googleapis.com/accounts/v1beta/accounts/ACCOUNT_ID/users/EMAIL_ADDRESS/emailPreferences

Here's a sample response from a successful call:

{
  "name": "accounts/ACCOUNT_ID/users/EMAIL_ADDRESS/emailPreferences",
  "newsAndTips": "OPTED_IN"
}

To retrieve the email preferences for a particular user, you can use the google.shopping.merchant.accounts.v1beta.GetEmailPreferencesRequest package, as shown in the following sample.

Java

  public static void getEmailPreferences(Config config, String email) throws Exception {

    // Obtains OAuth token based on the user's configuration.
    GoogleCredentials credential = new Authenticator().authenticate();

    // Creates service settings using the credentials retrieved above.
    EmailPreferencesServiceSettings emailPreferencesServiceSettings =
        EmailPreferencesServiceSettings.newBuilder()
            .setCredentialsProvider(FixedCredentialsProvider.create(credential))
            .build();

    // Creates EmailPreferences name to identify the EmailPreferences.
    String name =
        EmailPreferencesName.newBuilder()
            .setAccount(config.getAccountId().toString())
            .setEmail(email)
            .build()
            .toString();

    // Calls the API and catches and prints any network failures/errors.
    try (EmailPreferencesServiceClient emailPreferencesServiceClient =
        EmailPreferencesServiceClient.create(emailPreferencesServiceSettings)) {

      // The name has the format: accounts/{account}/users/{user}/emailPreferences
      GetEmailPreferencesRequest request =
          GetEmailPreferencesRequest.newBuilder().setName(name).build();

      System.out.println("Sending get EmailPreferences request:");
      EmailPreferences response = emailPreferencesServiceClient.getEmailPreferences(request);

      System.out.println("Retrieved EmailPreferences below");
      System.out.println(response);
    } catch (Exception e) {
      System.out.println(e);
    }
  }
GetEmailPreferencesSample.java

For more information about email notifications, see Change your Merchant Center email preferences.