Are Free Google Product Listings Really Free? What Your Store Website Needs Before You Sign Up for Merchant Center

Picture a big night market with a map board at the entrance. Anyone looking for a stall stops at the board first, then follows the arrows. The stalls that make it onto the board are usually the ones with a clear stall number, a clear shop name, and goods actually on display. A stall with no number, torn price tags, or goods piled up so nobody can tell what is sold? The person drawing the map has nothing to write for it.

Product search results on Google work a bit like that map board, and Google lets stores show products there without paying a listing fee. What many stores have not yet asked themselves before signing up is whether their stall is ready for the board to point to. This article summarizes what Google's help pages say and what your store website needs before you start. I will also tell you what I read and can confirm, and what you still need to check in your own account.

Check your own stall in 10 minutes

Open your store website on a computer and ask yourself four questions. First, does each product have its own page with its own link, or is everything on one page that you have to click open? Second, starting from the home page, can you reach every product by clicking through the category menu, without typing in the search box? Third, does each product page clearly show a name, price, photo, and whether the item is in stock or sold out? Fourth, does what the page says match what your admin tells customers in chat?

If you answered "no" to two or more, please do not worry. It means this article is useful to you, because these four questions match what Google writes in its own guidance, and we will go through them one by one.

What Google's help page says, and what it does not say

Google's page Show your products on Google for free says that stores can list products on Google at no cost, and it includes a list of supported countries, in which I found Thailand. The main conditions on that same page are that the store sells in a supported country or region, provides accurate and up-to-date product and store information, uses high-quality images, and includes relevant details such as size or the gender a product suits.

There are two things I want to say plainly, because people often read more into them than is there. First, that page is about free listings, but I found no statement confirming the position or the number of people who will see your products. So please do not build a business plan that counts on sales from this channel. Second, the list of supported countries may not match across every Google page, and that page shows no update date, so you should confirm your store's eligibility in your own Merchant Center account before making real plans.

The same page also describes Shopify stores: if you create the Merchant Center account through Shopify's app and the store meets the requirements, eligibility is enabled automatically. If the account is created outside Shopify, you need to check in Merchant Center whether your products can appear. The steps for submitting product data from a custom-built website are explained on other Google pages and change over time, so I will not describe them step by step here, to avoid sending you through steps that may be out of date.

What your store website needs first

The part we fully control is our own website. Google's page Help Google understand your ecommerce site structure, last updated on December 10, 2025, gives guidance that turns directly into a checklist. I have summarized it in four topics.

Give every product an entrance that can be reached by links

Google recommends building menus and internal links that lead from categories to subcategories and products, using normal a href links rather than relying on JavaScript events to move to another page. That page also says Googlebot generally does not type into a website's search box, so products reachable only through the search box may not be discovered, and Google strongly recommends linking to every product you want indexed.

If you cannot link to every item, that page offers an alternative: use a sitemap or a feed from Merchant Center. In practice, a well-built website usually generates a sitemap already. I suggest asking your web team whether new products are added to the sitemap automatically.

Help Google understand which page is which

Google's page Include structured data relevant to ecommerce lists the data types that suit an online store: BreadcrumbList for page hierarchy, Product and ProductGroup for products and their variants, Review for reviews, and Organization for business details such as the logo and contact channels. It also suggests that if you use a ready-made platform, you first check whether it has a plugin or extension that already adds this data. This is work for your web team, so you do not need to write it yourself, but it helps to know it exists and to ask the right question.

Keep product page information true

The free listings help page stresses accurate and up-to-date information. That sounds ordinary, but in real stores it is where things slip most often: a price changed in chat but not on the website, or stock that has run out while the page still says it is available. Naming one person who updates the website every time something changes in chat will reduce this problem a lot. For sharp photos, I wrote about how to shoot them with a phone in the article on taking professional-looking product photos with your phone.

Link featured products from pages people visit often

That same Google page says internal links are a signal of importance. Linking your best sellers from the home page, from blog posts, or from a newsletter helps Google judge how relevant those products are. If you have an article that introduces a product, try linking straight to the product page rather than making people go back and pick it from the menu again.

I will not argue that marketplaces bring customers too

Many stores already get customers from marketplace platforms, and that is a channel that genuinely works. I am not telling you to stop. Free listings on Google are one more door through which people searching for products can find your own website. It does not replace the existing doors, and it is a door where everything is in your hands, from the product page and the price to the checkout page. I compared the cost of selling through marketplaces in the article on platform commissions versus your own website, so I will not repeat the details here.

"My store is small. Who would see my products?"

That is an understandable question, and the honest answer is that I cannot tell you how many people will see them. Google's help page does not give that number, and I have no data from real stores that I can share.

What I can give you is two conditions. If people search for your product by its name or type, and your pages are ready according to the checklist above, you have a chance of being found. If nobody searches for your product with those words, then even a free listing will not be seen by anyone. Before you start, try opening Google Trends to see whether people search for your product terms. For an overview of what Google looks for in a business website, read on in the article on website standards Google expects.

Why preparing the website before signing up is worth it

Getting your website ready has benefits that do not depend on whether you list products on Google. Complete links, information that matches reality, and sharp photos also make it easier for customers who come straight to your website to buy. So even if this channel does not turn out as you hoped, the time you put in is not wasted.

The opposite order, signing up first and then trying to work out why products do not appear, is much harder. You have to check one point after another without knowing whether the problem lies with the website, the product data, or the account's eligibility.

The smallest version you can start this week

You do not need to sign up for anything. Start by checking your own website against the four questions above, then pick your five best-selling products as a prototype. Give each one its own page, a price and stock status that match reality, a sharp photo, and a link reachable from the category menu. Once these five pass, expand to the rest of your products, and only then open a Merchant Center account to confirm eligibility.

Examples you can open yourself

Everything I have summarized in this article can be read in the original on the three linked pages: Google's free product listings page, the ecommerce site structure page, and the ecommerce structured data page. I recommend reading at least the first one yourself, because Google's help pages can change, and what you see on the day you open it is the most accurate information.

What I have checked, and what I have not

So that you can tell how far each part can be trusted, I have split it into two groups. The group I read on Google's pages is this: listing products carries no listing fee; Thailand is on the list of supported countries; the store must sell in a supported country; a Shopify store that creates its account through the app is enabled automatically if it meets the requirements; and the guidance on a href links, linking to every product, not relying on the website's search box, and the structured data types that suit stores.

The group I have not checked and cannot confirm has three items. The first is the steps for submitting product data from a custom-built website. The second is any other conditions Google may set for stores on other pages, such as requirements about store policies. The third is real-world results, both the number of impressions and sales. Separating these two groups clearly is how I would like you to read every article, not just this one.

Five questions to ask your web team before signing up

If your website has a team looking after it, I suggest asking these five questions before opening a Merchant Center account. It will save a lot of time fixing things later. First, does every product have its own page with a permanent link, and are the menu links normal links or opened by script? Second, are new products added to the sitemap automatically, or does someone have to add them? Third, do product pages have Product structured data, and, if there are color or size options, ProductGroup as well? Fourth, is there Organization structured data that gives the store name, logo, and contact channels? And fifth, do the price and stock status on the website update automatically when they are changed in the back office, or does someone have to edit them by hand?

The team's answers will tell you how ready your website is, and if the answer to several is "not sure", that is a signal to have the web team check things before you sign up, rather than signing up and then wondering why products do not appear.

On evidence from real stores

I have not yet tried signing up with a real store for this article, so I have no figures for impressions, clicks, or sales from free listings to show you, and I will not make any up. Every sentence about Google in this article comes from the help pages linked above. The advice about preparing your website and naming a person responsible for product data is opinion from our own work, not a Google requirement.

A 6-step plan to prepare your website

1. Check your own website against the first four questions and note which ones fail.

2. Give every product its own page, reachable from the category menu without using the search box.

3. Ask your web team whether new products enter the sitemap automatically and whether Product structured data is in place.

4. Name one person who updates prices and stock on the website every time they change in chat.

5. Link your best sellers from the home page and from related articles.

6. Open your own Merchant Center account and confirm Thailand eligibility from the account page before planning further.

How to measure what you actually get

I suggest looking in two places. The first is the report in your own Merchant Center account, which shows the status of each product, whether it was accepted or where the problem is. The second is the number of visits to product pages coming from Google in your website's analytics tool, comparing the month before with the period after the preparation is finished. Please do not judge from a single week, because Google's data does not change immediately.

To close

The night market's map board does not pick the prettiest stall. It picks the stall with a clear number, a clear name, and goods that are really there. Your store website is the same. Everything Google asks for is what customers already want to know: price, stock, photos, and an entrance that is easy to find.

If you check and find that your current website cannot support product pages like this, or you are about to start your own store website, take a look at our website packages to see whether they suit your store, or message me and tell me where you got stuck.

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