Variants
Introduction and Business Impact
If your merchants have products that are very similar in nature and have differing variants (for example, color), we recommend to integrate your merchants products using the item group ID. When you use an item group ID to group your products, you can ensure that your merchants' products and their variants are shown to customers as a group, instead of separately. This provides a better experience to the user and can help improve clicks and impressions. Learn more about how the item group id works with Google Merchant Center.
Variants are a group of similar products (for example, Apparel products) that only differ from one another by product details like size or color.
Tech Guidance
When using the item group id, we recommend only sending products that differ by variants which have prices and can be added to your customers' carts. For a given product, you will need to submit all of the data that you have available for each variation.
For example, imagine you sell cell phones which come in colors black and green as well as sizes medium and large. You will submit four products.insert API calls. Each call will have the same item groupId, but will differ in the data for the product attribute variation (color and size). You will need to submit the same information variant data for each product. All of your cell phones will need to have color and size attributes provided, but they will differ by their specific variation. This can lead to a product disapproval or warning unless the attribute is filled.
We recommend the following resources:
- Follow this guide for more API guidance and examples
- Review our Merchant Center help center for the minimum requirements, best practices and examples.