Do you use Bigcommerce and struggle with Google Shopping disapprovals for inventory accuracy or can’t figure out how to get all the variations of a product into your shopping feed? Don’t worry. You’re not alone.
Many people with Bigcommerce carts can export their products but find they are only getting their product data at the parent level. Without the variations, this is a missed opportunity for many advertisers to market all the individual variations and drive more revenue back to their site. Also, without the inventory levels by the variations it leaves the potential for many product disapprovals instead of only disapproving an individual child level product that may be out of stock. For merchandisers with hundreds of products, customers looking for your products can’t find them as well as a lot of missed revenue.
Before we get into how to get to the child level data for all your products, let’s go over Bigcommerce settings. In Bigcommerce, make sure you’re using Product Options and Option Sets as well as inputting inventory appropriate to product variations. If not using product options, then check out the great tutorial videos that Bigcommerce offers.
Exporting Products
Bigcommerce has some robust features for importing and exporting bulk edits. One way they advise is creating a template to export product data. However, there is another way by using Bigcommerce’s Google Shopping integration, but this only includes the parent level products and not the options as they call it. They then direct users of their platform to their multichannel-listing apps.
API Exporting
We have found one additional way, which is setting up an API integration to pull all the relevant product information for all product variations. Bigcommerce has an API that allows for price and inventory variations to be pulled, which helps to prevent pricing and availability disapprovals. Bigcommerce API can be set up by obtaining first going to Settings & Tools, then creating a Legacy API account. Once created, you’ll need to give your developer the Username, API Path, and API Token that appear after you create the API account for your store.
This isn’t difficult to get started, but if you haven’t set one up previously then it can be time consuming at first. We’ve created our own BigCommerce API that lets you easily export all your products including variations, and we can set it up for you! Feel free to reach out anytime!
Brian Roizen is the Cofounder and Chief Architect of Feedonomics, a full-service feed optimization platform that optimizes product data for hundreds of channels. He has been featured on numerous podcasts and eCommerce webinars, and regularly contributes to Search Engine Land and other industry-leading blogs. Brian graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering.
