YouTube shopping displaying variants as separate products

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

A merchant is experiencing an issue where YouTube Shopping displays product variants (t-shirt sizes) as separate items rather than grouped together. When tagging products in videos, each size appears individually (e.g., “Cool T-shirt M” instead of “Cool T-shirt”), resulting in 18 separate products for 3 t-shirts with 6 sizes each.

Attempted Solution:

  • The merchant tried using the Multifeeds app, which successfully grouped variants in Google Merchant Center
  • However, the Google & YouTube app’s API overwrites these Multifeed settings when connecting the channel to the shop

Suggested Workarounds:

  • Use only one data feed app to avoid conflicts
  • Submit only one size per product and rewrite titles to exclude variant attributes
  • Edit titles directly in the YouTube marketing channel within Google Merchant Center
  • Note: Multifeeds cannot submit products to YouTube, and the Google & YouTube app creates a separate YouTube feed outside of Merchant Center

Status: The issue remains unresolved with no definitive solution for grouping variants specifically for YouTube Shopping.

Summarized with AI on October 31. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

I’m not sure if there’s actually a solution to this problem (as I’ve done a lot of searching!) but I’ll try here as one last throw of the dice.

I have 3 t-shirts I want to sync with my YouTube channel to display there, each having 6 sizes. Using the Google & YouTube app it syncs each size of each t-shirt as a separate product, meaning it’s displaying 18 products in my back end. I can see from others’ answers this is normal because Google may want to display the different sizes as separate products in different places. I get that.

However, on YouTube when I want a tag a t-shirt I’m wearing in a video to display as a timestamp, I have to select a specific size of that product, and it displays as - “Cool T-shirt M” instead of just “Cool T-shirt”. Not the end of the world, but not ideal.

I thought I’d cracked it by using the Multifeeds app. This successfully grouped the variants into single products in my Merchant Centre, but as soon as I use the (necessary) Google & YouTube app to connect my channel to my shop, that API overwrites my Multifeed settings.

So, is there a way to successfully group variants into single products for YouTube shopping specifically? I’ve contacted YouTube support and they weren’t much help if I’m honest.

Thanks in advance!

2

For Google Merchant Center you should only use 1 data feed app, to avoid issues.

Maybe consider to submit only one size, and re-write the title to be exclusive of the variant attribute.

Multifeeds can not submit products to youtube, as far as I know.

The google and youtube app submits a youtube feed outside of Google merchant center, hense why it’s different.

If you do have the youtube marketing channel in GMC, then you can edit the titles to make it more suitable.