Following the Woocommerce Prestashop comparison, we were recently confronted with the lack of a reliable and well-made plugin to export all Woocommerce product variations to Google Shopping. There is indeed an “official” plugin from Wootheme for Google Shopping, but it does not take variations into account. For a textile e-commerce site, this restriction is almost prohibitive: for example, you cannot submit a product feed with different colors, each associated with specific images.
So we dug deeper to find a plugin capable of handling the job. We found one from Purple Turle. Unfortunately, as the little beast was still under development, we had to get our hands into the code to compensate for all the shortcomings of this product. And the task is not as simple as it seems. In fact, variable products do not inherit the non-variable attributes of the parent product, which requires quite a bit of back and forth. For example, if a variation is made for size, but the parent product is marked as male (gender: male), the size variations do not include the gender information.
In short, after 3 weeks of work and back-and-forth with the developer, between the fixes they made and the ones we made: it works perfectly.
The plugin handles:
- A separate ID for each variation
- An identical Group_ID for each variation coming from the same parent product
- Handling of standard attributes: availability (stock management), ugs (sku), price, sale_price, etc.
- Handling of images for each variation
- Handling of custom attributes and mapping with Google Shopping attributes (gender, age_group, brand, etc.)
- Inheritance of non-variable attributes in the variation.
It requires manual configuration to be truly compliant with Google Shopping specifications, so if you would like to use Google’s marketplace with Woocommerce, feel free to contact us.
