Problem with GMB Products

[kathleen.rhodes]

We reached out to GMB Support because we are unable to add Products to two pizza restaurant listings. In ticket [8-2580000032256] Support replied, "We really apologize for the inconvenience caused. We would like to inform you that, for technical reasons Product Editor is not available for certain older accounts. We plan to resolve this soon, but we do not have a time frame to provide yet."

A nearby competing pizza restaurant is able to add products, which gives them an unfair advantage.

I asked about this in the GMB Support community 3 weeks ago but haven't gotten any response. @BenFisher or @JoyHawkins do you have any idea when Products will be rolled out the the "older" accounts?

 

[BenFisher]

Unfortunately no.

 

[dgrunited]

We reached out to GMB Support because we are unable to add Products to two pizza restaurant listings. In ticket [8-2580000032256] Support replied, "We really apologize for the inconvenience caused. We would like to inform you that, for technical reasons Product Editor is not available for certain older accounts. We plan to resolve this soon, but we do not have a time frame to provide yet."

A nearby competing pizza restaurant is able to add products, which gives them an unfair advantage.

I asked about this in the GMB Support community 3 weeks ago but haven't gotten any response. @BenFisher or @JoyHawkins do you have any idea when Products will be rolled out the the "older" accounts?

Add it as an Offer instead.

 

[JeffClevelandTN]

We reached out to GMB Support because we are unable to add Products to two pizza restaurant listings. In ticket [8-2580000032256] Support replied, "We really apologize for the inconvenience caused. We would like to inform you that, for technical reasons Product Editor is not available for certain older accounts. We plan to resolve this soon, but we do not have a time frame to provide yet."

A nearby competing pizza restaurant is able to add products, which gives them an unfair advantage.

Hi Kathleen, I had a similar issue and actually @JoyHawkins answered my question during the last LocalU Webinar during a Q&A session. If my suggestion doesn't work for you, it might help someone else. I apologize for the length of my reply, but again, the context may help someone. The short version to avoid TL;DR, you may want to make sure there aren't unnecessary business categories picked in GMB. Try simplifying it to just a single category like "Restaurant", wait for the edits to be accepted, log out and log back in. If you want the long answer, read on

I realize Ben and Joy have replied, both having so much more expertise in this area than 99.9% of us, but maybe what fixed my problem will work for you. I likewise received the same answer from Google support about one of my clients GMB pages where Products were not working: "...not available for certain older accounts."

It may be true that "older accounts" have a deficiency in this area, but I really felt like this wasn't the correct answer. As it turns out, a few days later the LocalU seminar happened and that's when I posted my question. I felt it was more due to the Business Categories assigned to the GMB account, than the account being too old. So I asked Joy my question towards the end of the webinar: "Are GMB pages with a category of Lodging able to create Products?" She and a couple of the panelists responded pretty quickly and said "No, most lodging categories, hotels, motels, etc are not permitted to have Products". They went on further to say there were a limited set of Business categories that were not allowed to have the Products tab. So I kind of had mixed feelings, as I was correct that Google's answer was not accurate in my situation, but disappointed that I couldn't get the Products tab working for my client.

So fast forward to a few days later... The same client has two businesses in close proximity, literally next door to each other but they are different but complementary businesses. The second business is not in the lodging category. We began our GMB audit on the other business page and we couldn't add Products either! I'm thinking, what is going on, this business isn't in the lodging industry!? But maybe it was one of those other category exceptions, but it didn't seem to fit as other competitors were showing Products. So I began looking at the business categories and the previous digital marketing company had really stuffed it with unnecessary categories and services. To my surprise, I found they had also added a few lodging categories to this business, probably thinking the more the better, even though this business isn't a hotel/motel/cabin rental business. I removed the lodging categories and all of the other extra categories and services, waited a brief amount of time for the edits to be accepted, signed out of the profile, signed back in and magically the Products feature worked! So Joy's answer really did help me out as I wouldn't have known that the lodging category was the culprit. I would have assumed it was the age of the GMB page. That one answer was so worth the cost of the LocalU webinar!

If there are other pizza restaurants showing Products, I'd suggest checking out their categories to see how they possibly differ from yours. Here's another thread with a fantastic free chrome extension that will let you check categories of other GMB pages with ease! You may want to go to the end of the thread responses as I replied with a workaround to be able to turn the plugin on/off as needed.