Team Goals and Business Objectives
Our goal is to make it easy for sellers to get their products listed on Google Merchant Center and therefore available to shoppers across all of Google.
- This will prepare the team to utilize similar mechanisms in creating the Amazon Marketplace connector.
- This may be beneficial for retail customers looking to increase sales with digital marketing.
Background and Strategic Fit
As of 2018, 46% of all online purchases started with a Google search. Retailers looking to get in front of customers can choose to use Google Merchant Center which allows them to display products within Google products (search, assistant, etc.). Manufacturers may also use Google Merchant to simply get more visibility of their products, even if they don't expect a direct sale through the channel.
This is a good candidate for a first sales channel integration because it will give the team familiarity with the Commerce product model and generating files to be used as a feed. It should be a relatively straightforward feature to prove the concept.
Assumptions
Technical Assumptions
- Use the channel
and channel type concept to allow Store Administrators to manage the integration with Google Merchant Center. A Liferay site channel will be configured with Google Merchant Center: https://www.lucidchart.com/documents/view/6dcce9a6-d6a2-4e7b-8d34-bcf34951b805/0_0
Use the channel filtering concept to allow merchandising managers to manage which products are fed to Google Merchant Center
- Use Talend Open Studio and the Liferay Components for any necessary heavy ETL processes (if needed)
- Use the Batch Framework to manage the management of bulk data (if needed)
- Use the Headless APIs, e.g. commerce-admin-catalog, for all data integration needs
- If any bugs exist or features are needed from any of the above Commerce features, the Commerce team will resolve them or GS can contribute a solution (create a COMMERCE bug ticket on issues.liferay.com)
This will be distributed as a Liferay Marketplace application (add-on)
- This will be part of Liferay Commerce out of the box
- We will generate a product definition file for a Liferay site channel in XML for direct manual upload through Merchant Center UI, scheduled fetch, or (S)FTP upload
- Store Admin will create and register feed in Merchant Center UI before products are uploaded to Merchant Center feed
- We will allow incremental feeds for faster feed updates based on last export date of products. For this, the feed must be configured to be incremental in Merchant Center