The new, improved Content API for Shopping

Since its launch in 2010, the Google Content API for Shopping has played a critical role in enabling merchants to manage product items, users, and subaccounts programmatically at scale. We’ve received a lot of feedback from you over the years, and today, we’re happy to announce a new version of this API.

The Content API version 2:

  • introduces new core functionality, including item-level data quality information, simple inventory updates, and additional account management features
  • is easier to use thanks to high quality client library support, improved tooling, reference documentation and integration with Google’s common API infrastructure
  • has simplified request and response message formats, and now also supports JSON in addition to XML encoding

Version 2 of the API constitutes a big overhaul and we’re eager for you to try it! Version 1 of the API will continue to be available until the end of February 2015, but we recommend that you adopt the new version as early as possible to take advantage of its new and improved features.

New core functionality: Data quality, inventory and account management

In version 2 of the API, you can request full data quality reporting for the whole account as well as item-level information like disapprovals due to incorrect prices or unavailable landing pages.

The inventory service lets you update price and availability of any product without resubmitting other product details.

All existing account management features, such as linking AdWords accounts, adding authorized users, and updating settings are now available for all account types.

Client libraries, better tooling and more

If you don’t want to parse JSON or XML yourself, check out the client libraries for .NET, Dart, Go, Java, JavaScript, Objective-C, PHP, Python and Ruby. The libraries use OAuth 2.0 authorization and work with the Content API as well as many other Google APIs.

The standard Google API tools such as the API console support Content API version 2 out of the box. Additionally, in our API reference documentation, you can now scroll down to the bottom of any reference page to try the API. You can also visit the standalone API Explorer to browse a list of supported operations.

Simplified message formats

The new XML format is lighter than in version 1 of the API. JSON, which is both simpler to work with and uses fewer bytes to transfer the same data, is also supported in version 2.

Learn more

If you would like to learn more about the Content API version 2 you can check out the API documentation. We’ve also prepared a few code examples in PHP and Java if you would like to dive in straight away.

If you have any other questions or comments, please head over to our support forum.

 - , Shopping Developer Relations