Google Merchant Center, Unpublished Products

Hi,

I suppose that you're talking about using the Google Products plugin in HikaShop to generate the XML file of the data of your products so that Google can retrieve that data to list your products.
I checked just to be sure but the plugin only takes into account the published products when generating the XML file.

Also, you need to be aware of this:
support.google.com/merchants/answer/188490?hl=en

Based on what is written there, when you unpublish a product in HikaShop, it will be removed from the XML next time the plugin is triggered, and Google won't see the product's data anymore in the XML, but it will only remove it from its listing 30 days after that point. And if you want it to be removed before this, you would have to manually delete it from the Google Merchant account as there is no mechanism in Google Merchant to "automatically delete product if not in the XML feed".

Also, as per this documentation page, an alternative to this would be to implement the expiration_date attribute in the plugin and that you first set the "sale end date" of the product a few days before you unpublish it so that it would be unlisted after the sale end date, and then removed completely from the account 30 days after being unpublished.

Hi,

The plugin will generate a XML file of the data of the products you have in HikaShop. That XML file can then be imported manually or automatically to Google Merchant.
So no, you don't have to create the products in Google Merchant. The plugin is already working like you want.

Thanks for the feedback on the description of the plugin. We'll improve it to make it clearer.

In the local XML file path you need to write the path of the XML file you want.
For example, if you want to use the URL yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml to access the XML, then you should enter sitemap.xml in that setting.
We'll improve this setting description to include that information.