MHLSF Overview

Merchant Hosted local Storefront (MHLSF) directs customers to the Merchant's website when a user clicks on a local inventory ad. By directing customers to the website instead of the Google-hosted local storefront, a merchant can track the customers' entire experience.

Merchants availing of MHLSF don't need to go through inventory checks. However, they are still required to pass MHLSF guidelines. As a result, a partner that achieves a MHLSF (Basic or Full) "Trusted" status, on top of their existing inventory checks "Trusted" status, will seamlessly onboard new merchants on MHLSF without any inventory or guidelines checks.

MHLSF Trusted status is achieved upon passing 10 consecutive guidelines checks. Work with Google and Business development team to initiate the process.

Implementation options

There are two types of MHLSF: full or basic

Feature Type	User experience	Shopping annotation displayed	Additional attribute needed in the product feed	Attribute example
Full	Clicking on a local inventory ad or a free local listing redirects to a product landing page that displays an item's availability at a specific store.	Users will be shown a distance annotation (for example, "3.5 mi") which shows the distance to a store where they can purchase the item.	[link_template]	Include the store code {store_code} ValueTrack parameter. URL structures vary across websites. Store codes can be URL parameters or part of the URL path. Example: http://myshop.com/123?store={store_code}
Basic	Clicking on a local inventory ad will redirect to a product landing page where customers can check the item's availability at a store nearby.	Users will be shown the "in-store" annotation which communicates that the item is available for purchase at a store nearby.	[link]	Example of link attribute value: http://myshop.com/123

A detailed description of the attribute requirements and website guidelines is available on the help center: MHLSF Basic MHLSF Full

Implementation requirements and best practices

Prerequisites: Local inventory ads enabled and Google ads account linked in Merchant Center

In the initial phase of working towards MHLSF trusted status, MHLSF needs to be enabled manually in the Merchant's Merchant Center Account.

Once MHLSF trusted status is achieved, this step can be done through the API by calling liasettings.setomnichannelexperience and passing the corresponding Local Store Front (LSF) type for that country for a particular merchant.

MHLSF acceptable values are:

• "mhlsfBasic" (Merchant-Hosted Local Store Front Basic)
• "mhlsfFull" (Merchant-Hosted Local Store Front Full)

MHLSF Basic

After selecting the Local Store Front type for the merchant, the product feed needs to be updated. MHLSF Basic requires the link attribute in the product feed.

Depending on the Merchant Center account set up, there could be an existing product feed targeting Shopping Ads and Local Free Listing. If that is the case, the link attribute might already exist. What's needed is to enable Local from that particular feed setting and make sure the ids passed in the pos.inventory API calls when submitting inventory data (quantity and price) match the ids in that product feed.

If the product feed was created through file upload, the Local channel can be enabled in the feed settings in merchant center.

Note:If the product feed was created through the API instead, offers need to be sent again through new API calls with the channel value set to local in the product feed

If a product feed doesn't exist yet, it has to be created and enabled for "Local". Then follow the procedure highlighted in the previous section.

MHLSF Full

Similarly to MHLSF Basic, after selecting the Local Store Front type for the merchant, the product feed needs to be updated. MHLSF Full requires the link_template attribute in the product feed which needs to include the {store_code} parameter.

This could be achieved by adding the attribute in an existing product feed, enabling the feed for "Local" in the feed settings and matching the IDs passed in pos.inventory calls to the existing Product feed ID.

If a product feed doesn't exist, it can be created, similarly to the MHLSF Basic setup.

Alternatively, the link_template attribute can be also added in a supplemental feed targeting the existing "Local Feed Partnership" feed. The "Local Feed Partnership" feed is created when pos.inventory is called and it appears in the "Feeds" section in the Merchant's Merchant Center Account.

The supplemental feed could contain two attributes: id (matching the id in the "Local Feed Partnership" feed) and link_template.

For more information on how to create a supplemental feed, see the supplemental feed documentation