Thisbluebird review for Google & YouTube
June 15, 2018
I'm sorry Shopify.... I rarely ever write reviews here, but this app is astonishingly bad. Update 6/14/18 The channel feeds your "shipping" rates to Google Merchant Center. It is supposed to feed the lowest rate to GMC, but it does not, it feeds the highest rate. In my case it is feeding Priority Mail Express. This means that shoppers on Google will think that all your products are super expensive to ship because they will not be shown your default shipping rate, which is usually the lowest rate available for whatever service you are using. If you edit the shipping data in GMC, Shopify will simply push the higher rate again and it will overwrite your correction. I just deleted this channel and started using a paid app. All of the new products that were added to my shop while this channel was running, have now lost all the Google product data that had been entered. Original Review The previous version was extremely basic and not easy to use, but what little useful functionality it had, has been completely removed from the new version. Here's a list of issues to save yourself the time and pain I just went though, there may be more issues than this, I just haven't encountered them yet. New app creates a "Channel" and is not really an App. It does not appear in the Apps section on your dashboard. It does not save product categories, custom product status, gender, age, or condition. I think it actually reset all the conditions to "new" regardless of their previous setting. I don't use MPC or UPC so I don't know what happens to those. The old dropdown list of categories is gone, so you must know the full path to the category and manually type it in. There is a handy link to Google's help page explaining categories, and from there another link to an excel or text file download where you can manually search for your category, then copy/paste the string of text to the Shopify screen. I have nearly 3000 products, so I was forced to pay $30 for another app to do true bulk editing. The 3rd party app process to fix the missing data for category, custom product status, age, and gender, and condition, took six hours to run because each of those data points had to be updated separately across 3000 products. They removed the Search function from within the Channel/App. It just shows the same tabs of the first 25 of your products in pending, rejected, published status, with forward/back arrows to scroll through the products. If you know a particular product has an issue, you can't find it within the Channel/App. You have to go to the general products area, search for it, then go to the "More" link at the top of the products screen, then click Google Shopping Data, then a window pops up with the data. This also means that for each new product added to your shop, you will have to remember to save it, then go to the More link and open the Google Shopping data popup to add the info. The Channel/App screens are sorted by oldest product first, which, if your store is selling well, are probably sold out products anyway. From the Channel, if you select multiple products and then click Actions > Edit you are taken to a standard Shopify Bulk Edit screen where you can add or remove columns, but you cannot sort by the columns, so if you have a mix of data and want only to fix the ones that are wrong, you have to scroll down and do them one at a time. The previous method of bulk editing at least provided you with a way to select multiple items in the list and then select a data point from a dropdown and change it to the new data. The Channel/App screens update the product status painfully slow. Google Merchant Center showed products were submitted and approved long before the channel said they were, the channel kept showing Pending on products that were already approved. For several days GMC showed a different set of "rejected" products than the channel showed. Right this minute, GMC shows 10 products disapproved, Shopify shows 0 rejected. Shopify shows 4 items pending, GMC shows 0 pending. Shopify never shows the total number of approved (or even total submitted) products so you will never really know if the numbers match what GMC says you have submitted and/or approved. The functionality to re-publish products to Google whenever you want has been removed. Now products only re-publish if the channel detects something has changed on the product.
