Get Live Inventory Displayed on Your Google My Business Listing

[JoyHawkins]

Many people are noticing that Google is showing live inventory on Google My Business listings for major retailers. The great news is that you don't have to be a massive chain to get this feature enabled.

DBA Platform, our primary sponsor & co-host for the next LocalU event next week, is one of only 4 companies that is able to get this set up for you. Connecting your live inventory to your Google My Business profile puts your product in front of the millions of shoppers on Google. Your products will appear in listings on the Google Shopping Tab, Google Search, Google Maps, Google My Business, Google Images, and Google Lens.

This feature is available in several countries including the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK and many others. Have questions for them about it? Please post them here.

 

[CarrieHill]

Many people are noticing that Google is showing live inventory on Google My Business listings for major retailers. The great news is that you don't have to be a massive chain to get this feature enabled.

DBA Platform, our primary sponsor & co-host for the next LocalU event next week, is one of only 4 companies that is able to get this set up for you. Connecting your live inventory to your Google My Business profile puts your product in front of the millions of shoppers on Google. Your products will appear in listings on the Google Shopping Tab, Google Search, Google Maps, Google My Business, Google Images, and Google Lens.

This feature is available in several countries including the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK and many others. Have questions for them about it? Please post them here.

I'm curious about tracking and attribution - is it possible to attribute this sale to GMB vs the shopping section? I've not worked with this at all so not sure about the capabilities.

 

[Rich Owings]

I wish there was a way to see how well this works on a category basis. For example, if a wine shop does this, will their products show up in Google searches for a product, or in the KP for their business?

 

[Yan Gilbert]

The Merchant Center has it's own dashboard but I am not sure if it breaks it down in those details. Data is sent to Analytics as well but I am not sure it can be separated if it comes from within the KP or other areas where the product gets displayed. I'll have to check that further.

@Rich Owings products in the merchant center can display in many places, but Google has been shifting things around constantly. For sure it always shows form within the KP though.


One thing I would like to add is that sometimes (about 20% from my tests so far) Google will start displaying a local three pack for a specific product query once SWIS is activated where no three pack was there before. Submitting the feed let's Google know that there is a local product available and it will trigger a local result.

It doesn't happen for every product though and one or two other listings are displayed as well, but the listing with SWIS will almost always be placed first if it has that product in stock. If your inventory has thousands of items, that's a lot of extra potential local results.

The Local Falcon scans show that this happens over a wide area.

 

[Rich Owings]

Thanks @Yan Gilbert . That helps. I was able to locate a wine shop showing "in stock" products in their KP (Astor Wines & Spirits in NYC). I saw others in Google Shopping for specific wine brands, but they were dominated by one chain doing paid placement.

I've got some clients I'll be discussing this with. Congrats on partnering with Google on this!

 

[Lachlan_Wells]

This is great to hear @Yan Gilbert , I've been looking into Pointy for a client, as well as Near St, specifically so I can sync local store inventory to GMB. Despite being acquired by Google in 2020, Pointy doesn't seem to be set up to serve all types of businesses just yet. As a fashion retailer, my client has multiple variants for each product eg. S/M/L/XL, which they can't support at the current time. So if DBA can manage that, or it's in the dev pipeline, that would be a big plus.

Also, any chance you could share a link to the POS providers that it integrates with? That would be super handy

 

[Yan Gilbert]

I've seen various sizes in inventory lists submitted by other retailers and if your different size clothing pieces have different GTINs then it should work.

For the POS systems, dbaPlatform can integrate with any POS if it can generate a report that contains UPC, price, quantity, store code. Just to give a bunch of examples for anyone who finds this thread, (not an exhaustive list):

Ascend
Celerant
Imagine Retail
Lightspeed Retail
LinkEdge
Microsoft RMS
NetSuite
Rain POS (real-time connection!)
RetailEdge
Retail Pro v8
Retail Pro v9
RICS (real-time connection!)
Shopify
Sportmas
Teamwork Retail
iZettle Pro
Talech POS
Counterpoint
Epicor
IPOS
Lightspeed OnSite/Pro
POSIM
Quickbooks
Runit
Shopkeep
Tallysoft

 

[Nikki Stine]

DBA Platform, our primary sponsor & co-host for the next LocalU event next week, is one of only 4 companies that is able to get this set up for you

Is it ok to ask who the other 3 companies are?

 

[Lachlan_Wells]

Is it ok to ask who the other 3 companies are?

The ones I'm aware of are Pointy and NearSt. Pointy was acquired by Google last year, and I believe the long term plan is to fully integrate it into Merchant Center. However they don't have the ability to support products with variants (size, colour) yet, which ruled it out for my fashion client. I understand that NearSt and DBA do support variants, however their business models are slightly different.

In our case, our choices are restricted by the POS we're using because they aren't able to automatically generate an inventory report for DBA. So you may find it useful to contact your POS first and see what they're capable and willing to provide.

 

[Nikki Stine]

Thank you for the reply @Lachlan_Wells