Link your Business Profile

To provide local inventory to the Merchant Center, you must first specify which businesses the Merchant Center will be responsible for. You can get the list of possible business groups from the Business Profile via the Content API, but you'll need to request access to the Business Profile first.

Request access to a Business Profile

To request access to your Business Profile, use the liasettings.requestgmbaccess method:

POST https://shoppingcontent.googleapis.com/content/v2.1/12345/liasettings/67890/requestgmbaccess?gmbEmail=admin@example.com

As this example shows, the gmbEmail query parameter specifies the email address of the administrator for the Business Profile.

After you call this method, the specified administrator will receive an email asking them to accept or reject the access request. This request expires after 7 days if no action is taken by the administrator.

List the available business groups

Once access has been permitted, you can see which businesses are available by calling the liasettings.getaccessiblegmbaccounts method:

GET https://shoppingcontent.googleapis.com/content/v2.1/12345/liasettings/67890/accessiblegmbaccounts

Response:
200 OK
{
  "kind": "content#liasettingsGetAccessibleGmbAccountsResponse",
  "accountId": 67890,
  "gmbAccounts": [{
    "type" : "user",
    "email" : "admin@example.com",
    "name" : "admin@example.com",
    "listingCount": 82
  },
  {
    "type" : "business",
    "email" : "california@example.com",
    "name" : "Golden-State",
    "listingCount" : 20
  },
  {
    "type" : "business",
    "email" : "florida@example.com",
    "name" : "Sunshine-State",
    "listingCount" : 15
  },
  {
    "type" : "business",
    "email" : "newyork@example.com",
    "name" : "Empire-State",
    "listingCount" : 25
  }]
}

Specify the business group for the Merchant Center account

Now that you have a list of possible business groups, you need to set the googleMyBusinessLink field in the Accounts resource associated with the Merchant Center account to the desired one. For example, if Merchant Center 67890 will contain products for California-based businesses, you can use Accounts.update to set that information:

PUT https://shoppingcontent.googleapis.com/content/v2/12345/accounts/67890
{
  "googleMyBusinessLink" : {
    "gmbEmail": "california@example.com"
  }
}

Response:
200 OK
{
  "kind": "content#account",
  "id": 67890,
  "googleMyBusinessLink" : {
    "gmbEmail": "california@example.com",
    "status" : "active"
  }
}

Setting the googleMyBusinessLink field does not require any manual verification, so the status of the link will be reflected immediately.

Submit product and inventory data

Now that the Merchant Center is associated with a business group, you can provide local product and local product inventory data for those businesses. For this, you use the same methods, such as products.insert that you use to upload online products and inventory data. For products.insert, you'll specify a channel of local instead of online.