Google Merchant Center: how to show your WooCommerce products on Google for free

The quotes and rules below come from Google Merchant Center Help, read on October 25, 2026, and from the Google for WooCommerce plugin page on WordPress.org. Each point says where it comes from. The Merchant Center interface changes more often than its help pages — if a button is named differently in your account, look for the same section.

What free listings are

The same product data that powers paid Shopping ads also shows up for free. Merchant Center Help calls these free listings: “With a free listing, the products you sell can appear at no cost on Google Search, Google Maps, Gemini, YouTube, the Shopping tab, Google Images, and Google Lens.” A click takes the customer to the product page in your store and costs you nothing; you don’t need a Google Ads campaign for it.

Two things the help pages say plainly:

• New accounts are opted in. “When you create a new Merchant Center account, you’re opted in to free listings by default.” You can view and change the status on the Free listings page in Merchant Center.
• Nobody guarantees a spot. The status “doesn’t guarantee that your products will be shown to customers”, because Google relies on the data you send to match your products with what customers search for. What you send matters — the product data is covered in the second-to-last section of this page.

Step 1: a Merchant Center account and a verified store website

“Merchant Center is a free tool” (Get started with Merchant Center). When you set it up, you enter your business information first, then payments and shipping, and finally choose where your products come from. Choose the business country carefully: “The country selected during account set up cannot be changed later.”

Then Google needs to know the store is yours. That is two steps in one (online store URL verification): verification confirms you own the website, and claiming reserves its address for your account — “A single URL can only be claimed by one account.” You can verify through your e-commerce platform, by email, with an HTML file or tag, or through Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics.

Step 2: a store website Google can trust

Google checks the store, not only the products. From the Merchant Center guidelines:

• Contact details that are easy to find. “Make your contact information clearly available on your website. Examples: a contact us form, a link to your business profile on social media, an email address or phone number.”
• A return policy, even if you don’t take returns. “Even if you don’t offer returns or refunds, still state your policy explicitly.” Say when you accept a return, within what time, and when the customer gets their money back.
• A secure checkout. “You must secure your checkout with a valid SSL certificate” (checkout requirements) — payments, transactions and every piece of personal data.
• Shipping costs in Merchant Center. In many countries they are a must for free listings: Google lists the countries where you have to set up shipping settings or send the shipping attribute (free listings). Return policies can go into Merchant Center too — Google recommends it.

In WooCommerce, contact, returns and shipping are ordinary WordPress pages. Linking them in the footer makes them visible from every page of the store, including the product page a customer lands on from Google.

What Google does not accept is described in the Misrepresentation policy — among other things, to “present a false identity, business name, or contact information”, or not disclosing “the total price, including all taxes, fees, and surcharges”. For most violations Google sends a warning and gives you “7 or 28 calendar days to fix your issue”, but “we may not issue a warning for egregious policy violations.” A suspended account means your products no longer show.

After a fix, you request a review (request a review): “The review may take up to 7 business days to complete.” If the issues are not resolved by the second attempt, a one-week cooldown period may begin, and it “may increase with each unsuccessful review afterwards.” That is why the store website is worth fixing before you first send products, not after a suspension.

Step 3: products from WooCommerce

The shortest route is Google for WooCommerce, a free plugin by WooCommerce on WordPress.org with more than 800,000 active installations (version 3.10.0, released October 20, 2026). The plugin page says: “Sync your WooCommerce product feed to Google Merchant Center” and “Once you sync your store it’s automatically listed on Google” — an ad campaign is optional. Newer versions say “product feed” instead of “free listings”, so don’t look for the word “free” in its settings.

The plugin reads the GTIN from the WooCommerce field “GTIN, UPC, EAN, or ISBN” (product edit screen → Product data → Inventory; since plugin version 2.9.0). In a variable product, each variation has its own number — more on that in Product with no GTIN in WooCommerce.

Other store platforms connect through their own Google integration. Merchant Center also accepts a product file from another feed plugin, Google Sheets, products read automatically from your website (this needs structured data on product pages and a verified website), or the Merchant API.

How long it takes. “Reviews may take up to 3-5 business days for Shopping ads and a few weeks for other features (such as free listings).” (product status)

What Google disapproves or limits in a product

The account and the store get you in. After that, Google reviews every product on its own.

• Fields that are always required (product data specification): ID, title (up to 150 characters), description (up to 5,000 characters), link, image link, availability and price. Brand for new products. Condition for used and refurbished ones.
• Price and availability that match the website. If the prices you send “are different from the information on your website. This may lead to an account suspension” (mismatched price); the same goes for availability.
• A clean photo (image link): “Don’t use an image that contains promotional elements or overlays” — no watermarks or stamps, no prices or sale text, no placeholder that doesn’t show your product. Today the minimum is 100 × 100 px (250 × 250 px for apparel); from January 31, 2027 every image must be at least 500 × 500 px (specification update). What the warnings Merchant Center already shows mean: Image too small for upcoming enforcement.
• The GTIN, if the manufacturer assigned one (GTIN): “if the product does have a GTIN assigned and you don’t submit it, then the product could be disapproved.” Products without it or with a wrong one “may have limited visibility”. Never make a number up — a product with no GTIN (handmade, your own production) sends a brand and an MPN.

How to find each of these gaps in WooCommerce, field by field: Disapproved in Google Merchant Center? The WooCommerce fields behind it.

Where you see the result

• Product status: the Products page in Merchant Center shows whether each product is approved, limited or not approved, with the issues that need your attention (product status).
• Clicks from free listings: “You can do this easily on the Performance page in Merchant Center by filtering results for free listings” (free listings).

Check your catalog before you send it to Google

Merchant Center reports disapprovals only after you send products, and a review takes days or weeks. Some gaps are visible earlier, from the outside. The no-install store check reads the public catalog of a WooCommerce store and shows products with no price or that can’t be bought, products with no photo of their own, one main photo shared by many products, main photos smaller than 500 × 500 px and sold-out products still in the catalog. No install, no account, no access to your admin.

The GTIN can’t be seen from the outside. Products and variations without one, the same number on two products and photos too small for Google are listed by the free Merchlint plugin, which only reads and changes nothing in your store.