Pilot complete: Google Merchant is live — video in the Shopping feed

eBay was a sales channel. Shopify was a shop. Google Merchant Center is neither — and that's exactly what made the pilot so different. The Merchant Center is a feed: the structured data base that Google Shopping and Performance Max campaigns pull their product ads from. Nobody "sells on Merchant Center." You feed it.

Three months later, Google Merchant is out of pilot today. But the lessons were more technical and more sober than the marketplaces — and honestly the most useful for my understanding of where product video really works and where it doesn't.

Why this pilot was smaller

With eBay and the social channels, the pilot hurdle was the workflow: sellers had to create videos, approve them, publish them. With the Merchant Center the workflow is almost invisible — Buust attaches itself as a supplemental feed to the existing primary feed and enriches each offer with the video URL. No uploading, no click per product.

So the Merchant Center pilot was deliberately smaller and more technical than the "ten sellers per platform" of the other rounds: a handful of merchants who already run Google Shopping, keep well-maintained feeds, and were willing to give us honest feedback on feed quality. Not a marketing showcase — a data test.

Finding one: the video doesn't fix a weak offer

That's the finding that grounded me the most. We went in hoping a video would broadly lift the click-through rate of a Shopping offer. What showed up: Google still ranks the Shopping feed primarily on image and data quality. A video on an offer with a thin title, missing attributes, or a mediocre main image does almost nothing — because the offer wasn't being served in the first place.

Where offers were cleanly structured — complete required fields, a cut-out main image, the correct category — the video had an effect as an addition. So the order is non-negotiable: fix the offer first, then attach the video. We sharpened the Buust Score accordingly, so it takes the feed's required fields as seriously as the video itself.

Finding two: the supplemental feed has to run without a rebuild

There's a technical path to making video visible in Google that demands a "watch page" — a separately hosted video page that Google crawls. For a merchant, that's an infrastructure project. In the pilot we committed to the other path: Buust attaches the video MP4 URL directly to the existing offers in the Merchant Center. No watch page, no DNS, no extra hosting step for the merchant.

The effect: as soon as a merchant has a primary feed in the Merchant Center, the Buust supplemental feed runs immediately. That was the bar we set ourselves — an integration that works on day one, not one that only kicks in after a setup weekend.

Finding three: one video, multiple sources

During the pilot we made the matching provider-agnostic. Buust now finds the right offer in the feed not only via the Shopify product ID, but also via SKU and EAN — so a Shopware merchant places the same video in the Merchant Center just as cleanly as a Shopify shop. It sounds like a detail, but it's the difference between "works for my shop type" and "doesn't work."

What changes for merchants now

Buust for Google Merchant is no longer a pilot feature as of today. The integration — a supplemental feed to your Merchant Center, video on your existing offers, no watch page — is part of every plan starting at Free.

If you already use Google Shopping, connect the Merchant Center and you'll see your videos in the feed once the next feed fetch goes through. If you don't have a primary feed yet, start there — the video follows on its own afterward.

Connect Merchant Center and bring video into your Shopping feed →

What's piloted next

The pilot funnel keeps running — Google Merchant is out, other platforms stay open: Amazon, Shopware 6, Etsy, Wix, OTTO Market, Kaufland, and the Tier-2 marketplaces. On the social side, the LinkedIn Company Page and X remain in active pilot, plus Google Business as a bonus for local merchants. Each platform has 10 free seats.

Thanks to the Merchant Center pilot merchants — the ones with the well-kept feeds and the patience to explain to us why a video is no cure-all. That was the most honest feedback of the whole pilot series.