Apparel
Introduction/Business Impact
Due to the nature of having numerous variations, apparel products require additional product data attributes to serve on Free Listing and Paid Ads. By meeting the Free Listing and Paid ads apparel product data requirements, this will help customers get the best experience to find their specific apparel products.
Apparel products have the potential to have many variants. For variant products, we recommend using the item_group_id attribute to group product variants in your product data. For apparel variants, these are attributes of similar products that only differ from one another like size, color, material, pattern, age_group, and gender.
Tech Guidance
We recommend following this guide to learn the best practices about how to approach submitting data to Merchant Center for apparel products. Below are additional recommendations:
Attribute mapper: We recommend building an attribute mapper which allows merchants to choose which field from their product catalog to source filling out the associated apparel attribute values. Or if the mapping is easy to do on behalf of the merchants, you can automate this without the merchant having to choose to make it easier for them. If you decide to automate, we recommend still providing the ability for your merchants to update specific product values to fix potential product issue errors.
Enhancing product titles: If it is possible and it is nice to have, we recommend restructuring the product titles sent on behalf of the merchants for apparel products. This can potentially improve performance. Otherwise and if you can’t, passing on product titles from your catalog is good enough.