Generate a WooCommerce Google Merchant Center feed plugin
Google Merchant Center is strict. A feed with the wrong attribute name, an unset MPN, a missing g:availability value or a malformed price makes the whole product fail validation. Public WordPress plugins for Merchant feeds work for baseline catalogues, but the moment you have variable products with region-specific prices, custom attributes Google cares about (g:gender, g:age_group, g:material), or you sell across multiple countries with different feed URLs, the free plugins start rejecting products and the pro versions cost €150-300/year.
Generating the feed plugin yourself, with your attribute mapping baked in, is often the cleanest way to reach 99% validation. We ship a plugin that generates XML exactly in the format Google expects, respects your actual business rules, and refreshes daily via cron — all without a monthly fee.
Why generate it instead of installing an existing plugin?
Product Feed Pro for WooCommerce (free from AdTribes) and its pro counterpart are the well-known options. The free version gets you started for small shops; pro (€99-149/year) adds variable product support, scheduled updates and multiple feeds. If you operate in three countries with different VAT and currencies, you quickly need three feeds and therefore the pro tier.
The pro plugins also impose a UI for mapping product attributes to Merchant attributes. It is a reasonable UI, but your team still needs to learn it. A generated plugin with your mapping hard-coded is faster to operate: the product editor in WC stays untouched, and the feed updates itself.
Google changes the Merchant spec every 6-12 months. Keeping up with deprecated attributes and newly required ones in a plugin you own is a 5-line change. In a pro plugin, you wait for the vendor to release an update and hope it is in this quarter.
Example prompt
This is the kind of description that generates this plugin. You can start from it and tweak whatever you need before hitting generate.
Plugin name: Acme Merchant Feed
Generate an XML feed at /wp-content/uploads/acme-feed/es.xml (Spain) and /eu.xml (rest of EU, in EUR).
Included products:
- WooCommerce simple products with stock > 0 and category NOT "hidden".
- Variable products: one <item> per variation, parent used for shared attributes.
Attribute mapping:
- id → product SKU (or variation SKU if present).
- title → product name + variation attribute summary.
- description → short_description stripped of HTML.
- link → permalink.
- image_link → featured image URL (largest size), additional_image_link for gallery.
- availability → "in_stock" if stock > 0 else "out_of_stock".
- price → regular_price + " EUR".
- sale_price → sale_price + " EUR" if set and date range is current.
- brand → product attribute "pa_brand".
- mpn → post meta "_mpn" (fallback to SKU).
- google_product_category → from a mapping table (WC category ID → Google taxonomy ID) configurable in admin.
- gender, age_group, size, color → mapped from WC attributes pa_gender, pa_age, pa_size, pa_color.
- shipping → include for Spain flat rate EUR 4.95.
Daily cron at 04:00 regenerates both feed files.
Admin page: feed URL, last refresh timestamp, row count, validation summary ("all products included" or "12 products skipped, reasons: ...").
HPOS-compatible.What the generated plugin typically includes
- XML builder using DOMDocument (clean, validated output)
- Feed file written to wp-content/uploads/ (never served dynamically — stale XML is fine, bandwidth is cheap)
- Scheduled regeneration via WP Cron with lock via transients to prevent overlap
- Per-country feed support with different currencies and shipping fragments
- Admin dashboard with validation summary and "regenerate now" button
- Mapping UI for WC categories → Google product taxonomy
- HPOS compatibility + uses WC CRUD throughout
Add Facebook Catalog feed, Bing Shopping, TikTok Shop — all the same shape, different attribute names. Describe the spec in the prompt.
Frequently asked questions
How does Google pick up the feed?
You configure the URL of the generated XML in Google Merchant Center → Products → Feeds → Create new feed → Scheduled fetch. Google refreshes every 24-72 hours. Our plugin regenerates daily, so Google always sees fresh data.
What about multi-language feeds?
If you use WPML or Polylang, the plugin reads the translated post content and generates one feed per language. Mention the multilingual plugin in the prompt so we integrate it correctly.
Can it handle variable products correctly?
Yes. We produce one <item> per purchasable variation, with item_group_id linking back to the parent. This is the format Google Merchant requires for variants with distinct SKU/price/stock.
What if my Merchant account is in multiple countries?
We generate one feed URL per country, each with its own currency and shipping block. You register each one separately in Merchant Center pointing at the corresponding URL.