The new Google Shopping app by Shopify syncs all variants. The old one didn’t.
I suggest you get DataFeedWatch to manage your Google Shopping ads. We use it for all clients. You can ask DFW support to disable variants. Then there’s a whole tonne of other reasons to use it (like not advertising a product if 60% or more of variants are out of stock.) I’ve compared the feed management tools in this chapter of my Google Shopping book plus there’s a walk-through of how to set it up optimally for sales.
That DataFeedWatch app / service is too expensive. Any other way to remove my most expensive variants from google shopping. This is really an obvious problem someone should solve. We are paying for those ads so we should be able to pick what variant we want to advertise. Who should be solving this issue?
I have the same problem. My products look more expensive because google shopping ranks high the most expensive variant…not fair, paying for this app to do that and giving me no choice.
I also have the same problem. The Shopify Google Shopping app is very basic unfortunately and doesn’t support the option to hide variants. However, you can do it with the app “Feed For Google Shopping”. This costs just 4,99 a month and offers the option to hide the variants. This is the best alternative for as far as I know.
You could delete the unwanted product variants within your Google Merchant Center account (Products > All Products)
You can remove the products from publishing to Google within the per-product Shopify channel settings, then use the Google Sheets method to create your own feed for that product and it’s variants.
Thanks for this, Andrew! BlossomLab’s option 3 worked well for our circumstances. Having control over which variants are published is worth the maintenance of a separate sheet for the feed.
I have the same problem with Facebook and google shopify feeds. I think I will just export my data into access and strip it like that . I am working with my own custom products but also another supplier feed.
It seems the best option for both Facebook and google is to work with you own csv product feeds . Shopify fields don’t map properly to Facebook fields and it just makes everything way to messy.
Almost 4 years later and there is still no way to do this without jumping through overly-complicated hoops. There should be a checkbox next to the variants in the feed to remove it from the channel. Ridiculous that it hasn’t been implemented. If you remove a variant from the feed, it resyncs and adds it right back.
I would suggest that you create a rule in google merchant center to set “availability” to “out of stock” for those variants you don’t want to advertise or list in Google Shopping.
To create a rule, do the following:
Go to your merchant center account
Click Products > Feeds > Content API > Feed Rules
Click the “+” to create a new rule. Search on “avail” and select “Processed Attribute: Availability”
Add a condition. (In my case, my condition is when the title attribute contains “with tag”) [Note that “title” attribute is actually a combination of the shopify product title and variant title. My “with tag” is actually one of the variant options, so I filter on that.]
Alternatively, you could set one of the custom fields in shopify Google Channel setting for the product to some specific value and use that value to trigger the “out of stock” setting in Merchant Center. Note that the custom fields are set at the product level in shopify. So you still need to use a variant-specific identifier in Merchant Center to identify the correct variants.
Go back up to the top part and create a rule using the condition “Custom label 0” combined (i.e. “AND”) with another variant-specific attribute (e.g. title, gtin, price, etc.)
I finally found a quick and easy solution for this. Use the shopify app “Simprosys Google Shopping Feed” and it has a checkbox to exclude variants when sync’ing your feed. Super easy to use. It does cost $4.99 a month but its worth it if it just gets you one more sale a month or saves you hours of manually fixing this issue.
Thank you FurnaceX. I agree with you. If you have all products in Merchant Center then a Feed Rule will be your easiest solution vs editing in Shopify. I followed a similar process as you using your directions, so thank you! I use Flexify app for my product feed which is free for up to 1,000 products (not including variants). I set up my feed rule using the ‘price’ attribute setting it to ‘out of stock’ like recommended above. Giving full thanks to FurnaceX for the solution. I followed his steps, however for step 4, my condition was to set ‘price’ contains ‘44.95’ then adding an OR statement for ‘price’ contains ‘54.95’ and that has disapproved my two more expensive variants in my all products. Thanks again!
EDIT: please note that this solution will only work if the pricing stays the same. If there is a price increase, then pricing will need to be adjusted. This is a personal project so I don’t plan on increasing the price, but if I do, I’ll have to edit my rule and reprocess feed.