Merchant Center Next replaces Merchant Center

Goodbye Merchant Center, hello Merchant Center Next.

Today, Google officially unveiled a new, simplified version of Merchant Center called Merchant Center Next: Google Marketing Live 2023.

More than just the look and feel of Merchant Center Next will change. For example, products can be auto-populated from a retailer’s website.

Why it matters to us. This new change should take the headache out of non-technical folks struggling with feeds while providing better insights for data-hungry retailers. The insights in the Performance tab look promising, especially for those prioritizing product fixes.

Merchant Center Next vs. Merchant Center. Merchant Center was a manual process that consisted of setting up a product feed with all required products, prices, images, descriptions and more.

Merchant Center Next detects all of this on your website and pulls it in automatically. However, there is good news: Merchants can edit these products or disable the feature altogether.

According to Google, while the experience is being described as “simplified,” “the Merchant Center features that larger retailers know and love aren’t going away either.”

Google is “committed to rolling out the new version at a responsible pace that takes users to where they can expect feature parity that meets their expectations.”

Better Insights. A major change will affect the user interface. A streamlined view brings insight reports right into the Performance Tab.

This appears to contain more data as new tabs appear which include:

• overview
• Products (existed before)
• Competitive Visibility
• pricing
• demand
• Save to search and maps
• Non-product website results

According to Google, Merchant Center Next shows all merchants with online and brick-and-mortar locations all products in one view to manage online and in-store product inventory in one place.

New insights into the benefits of fixing product errors are also displayed in Merchant Center Next.

When Merchant Center Next will replace Merchant Center. The rollout is scheduled to be completed in 2024. Merchants will be notified when Merchant Center Next is ready for them.

Many new users have already seen Merchant Center Next rolled out to them. Smaller companies will be upgraded in the coming months.