Listing your products on Google and Facebook

Once your shop is connected to Shopify or WooCommerce, Aura can hand Google Merchant Center and Meta Commerce Manager a product feed — the file they read to list what you sell in Google Shopping and in Facebook/Instagram shops. You paste one URL into each of them, once, and they come back for it daily on their own.

41.1 Getting your feed URL

Back Office → Settings shows a feed URL for each connected store. Copy it, then:

• Google: Merchant Center → Products → Feeds → add a scheduled fetch and paste the URL.
• Meta: Commerce Manager → Catalogue → Data sources → Scheduled feed, same URL.

Set both to fetch daily. Aura rebuilds the file at most every 15 minutes and tells the crawler when nothing has changed, so a daily poll costs your server almost nothing.

Treat the URL like a password. It has no expiry — deliberately, so your Shopping listings never go dark on a date nobody remembers — but anyone with it can read your catalogue. It shows only what a customer would see on your storefront: never your cost prices, your suppliers, or how many you have in stock.

41.2 What gets listed, and what doesn't

A product must already be pushed to your storefront. Google checks that every listing has a working product page; something that only exists on your till would send a shopper to a dead link, and Google would reject it. This is also why a restaurant's menu never appears in Shopping by accident.

Beyond that, an item is listed when it is active, named, priced, and has a photo. These stay out:

If something you expected is missing, check those five things in order; it is almost always the first one.

41.3 What Google sees

Each variant is listed separately — Small and Large are two entries that Google knows are the same product, so a shopper searching for one size lands on that size. Prices go out VAT-inclusive in rands, which is what Google expects for South Africa. Availability tracks real stock, less anything already reserved for a collect order, so an item held for someone else shows as out of stock rather than being sold twice.

Where you have a real barcode, Aura sends it as the product's global identifier — but only when it is genuinely one. A shelf code or an internal SKU is not sent as a barcode; the item is declared as having no identifier instead. That is the honest answer, and a fabricated barcode is grounds for disapproval.

Products carrying a shipping weight (§40.3) send it too, so Google can show delivery costs alongside the price.