Headless made your store fast. It also took it off Google Shopping.
Shopify's Google channel feeds Shopping from the storefront Shopify hosts. Go headless and the feed keeps sending shoppers to the old address, while Google checks a page that is no longer there. Nothing tells you.
We are looking for headless Shopify stores running Shopping ads, to build this with.
Illustrative store. Issue names are Merchant Center's own.
Shopify keeps the catalog. Google runs the auction. Headless cuts the wire between them.
Not a bug in Shopify or in Google. It is the seam: the Google channel was built for a storefront Shopify serves, and a headless store is the one case where it does not.
Your catalog, exactly as before
- Title, description, price and stock
- A link to the storefront Shopify hosts
- Refreshed whenever you edit a product
A page that moved
- A landing page it cannot match to the item
- A price it has no way to confirm
- A storefront domain nobody claimed
The first fix everybody tries does not work.
Leave the feed pointing at Shopify and redirect the ad click to your real storefront. Google closed that door on purpose: the ads redirect has to resolve to the same domain as the link, and land on the same page content.
Which leaves one honest option. The feed itself has to carry the addresses your storefront actually serves.
The feed should come from the thing that built the page.
GemBoss already serves your headless storefront, so it knows the address of every product on it and renders the price Google will read. The feed stops being a guess about your own site.
- Written from your Shopify catalog, addressed to the storefront you serve
- Price and stock read back from the rendered page before the feed ships
- You add the feed in your own Merchant Center. GemBoss does not push to it
Illustrative store.
Three things move. Your catalog, checkout and ad account do not.
Shopify stays the system of record and Google keeps running the auction. GemBoss takes the part in between, the part headless broke.
The feed
Written from your catalog and addressed to the storefront you actually serve, so a click lands where your money was spent.
The check
Every price and stock state compared with the page that renders, before the feed ships, instead of a disapproval a week later.
The page
Shopping traffic can get its own product page today, through a personalization rule on traffic source.
A shopper from Shopping already did their browsing.
They arrived on a picture with a price on it, from a row of four pictures with prices on them. Four things decide it.
- Price visible without a scroll, because three other tabs are one keystroke away
- Shipping and returns beside the button, not in the footer
- Stock stated plainly, a reason to stop looking at the other tabs
- No discovery: a mega menu on this page is an exit, not a service
A GemBoss storefront, shown as an example.
What is shipped, and what is not Early access
Today GemBoss builds and serves the headless storefront, and can give Shopping traffic its own page. The feed and its check are in early access with the first stores, and GemBoss does not push to Merchant Center: you add the feed in your own account.
What is already true is the problem. Each of these issues is documented by Google, the redirect workaround is closed by Google, and you can confirm all of it on your own account this afternoon without talking to us.
Bring us a headless store that runs Shopping ads.
We will go through its Merchant Center diagnostics with you and tell you which of these issues you have. If it is none of them, we will say so and you will have lost half an hour.