This plugin sends your Acuitas eCommerce products to Google, so they can appear in Google Shopping results. This page explains what it does, how to set it up, and what to do about the problems it reports.
Every night we read your product list from Acuitas, turn it into the format Google Merchant Center expects, and publish it at a private web address. Google collects it from there on its own schedule. Prices, stock levels and new products reach Google without anybody re-entering them.
Three things are worth being clear about, because they surprise people.
Setup is three screens and takes a few minutes. You can stop after any of them and come back — nothing is published until the last step is finished.
Before you start, one thing needs doing in Google. Google will not accept a feed for a website it has not confirmed you own. If you have never verified and claimed your website address in Google Merchant Center, do that first — the Google step here will fail otherwise, and it fails in a way that is hard to read.
By default, everything in your Acuitas eCommerce catalogue is included. You can narrow it to particular product types — frames, sunglasses, contact lenses, accessories — if you only want some of them advertised.
Leaving the list empty means everything, which is what most practices want. This choice is not permanent: you can change it later and the next refresh follows the new setting.
You will also see which practice location this feed covers, and what it will cost. Both are read from Acuitas rather than chosen here.
Three pieces of information, and one of them is permanent.
| Field | What it means | Changeable later? |
|---|---|---|
| Countries you sell to | Where Google should show these products. Most single-country practices enter one. | Yes |
| Product information language | The language your product titles and descriptions are written in, in Acuitas — not the language of this screen. | No, once the feed exists |
| Website address | The domain you verified and claimed in Google Merchant Center. It must match exactly. | Contact support |
The language cannot be changed after your first feed is created. This is Google's rule, not ours: a feed's language is fixed when the feed is created, and changing it means a new feed and re-approval. The screen locks the field once that has happened and says so. If it is wrong, contact support before going further.
The last step opens Google in a new tab and asks you to sign in. You are giving this plugin permission to manage product data in your Merchant Center account — nothing else. It cannot see your Google Ads spend, your email, or anything outside Merchant Center.
Once you are back, we do four things for you automatically:
If you are shown a list of Merchant Center accounts, pick carefully. Choosing the wrong one sends this practice's products to another account's listings. If you do not recognise the account you expect to see, stop and contact support rather than guessing.
You can disconnect at any time from the Connection screen. Disconnecting stops the nightly refresh and stops the charge, and the screen tells you exactly what happens before you confirm it. Your existing Google listings do not vanish immediately — Google removes a product about 30 days after the last time the feed refreshed it, so they fade out over the following month.
The state at the top is the short answer to “is this working?”.
| State | What it means |
|---|---|
| Live | Your products are being served to Google and Google is collecting them. |
| Needs attention | The feed is working but something is costing you listings. The blockers list says what. |
| Paused | Nothing is being refreshed. Contact support to resume. |
| Not connected | Setup has not been finished. The screen offers the next step. |
Below that is the funnel: how many products are in Acuitas, how many your settings include, how many we could turn into a listing, how many passed Google's rules, and how many are actually in the feed. The gaps between those numbers are where your listings are being lost, and every figure has an i beside it that explains what it counts.
“Last collected by Google” is the number that matters most. A feed that builds perfectly every night but has never been collected is not working yet — it usually means something is unfinished in Merchant Center rather than here.
The blockers list is ordered by how many listings each problem is costing you, so working from the top is the fastest way to more listings. Each one has a “Why Google needs this” link to Google's own explanation, and most have a link straight to the affected products in Acuitas.
Almost every fix is made in Acuitas, not here. The most common are:
| Problem | Where to fix it |
|---|---|
| No price | Add a price to the product in Acuitas. Google will not list a product without one. |
| No image, or an image under 500×500 pixels | Add or replace the product image in Acuitas. Google starts rejecting images below 500×500 on 31 January 2027, so these show as a warning before they become a rejection. |
| Missing brand or product identifiers | Fill them in on the product record in Acuitas. |
| Price or stock does not match your website | Google compares the feed against your live site and can suspend listings over a mismatch. Usually the website is out of date rather than the feed. |
| Missing product information generally | The attribute coverage table shows which fields Acuitas is not supplying. Filling them in improves how often Google shows the product. |
After a fix in Acuitas, you do not need to do anything here — the next nightly refresh picks it up. If you want it sooner, press Update now. You can also use Preview feed to see exactly what Google would receive, without publishing anything.
€5 per practice location per month. A location is charged for a month when its feed was live and being published during that month.
The details panel on the overview screen breaks down what is being counted for the current month, so the figure on your invoice can be checked against something.
Three things are deliberately not self-service yet, and the plugin will tell you so:
If a screen asks you to quote a setting name — something like
ShoppingFeed.Service.BaseUrl — that is a configuration problem in how the
plugin was installed for your practice, not something you can fix. Quote the name exactly;
it tells support precisely what is wrong.
When you contact support, the two most useful things to include are your practice name and what the overview screen's state says. If you are reporting a product that is not appearing, the product code helps.