There are two different kinds of product IDs used in the Shopping Content APIs.
The first kind of ID is assigned to a product by a merchant called the
offerId. This ID consists of a string that represents a particular offer.
An offerId is unique to the set of offers in the Shopping Merchant Center
database, and is usually a numeric sequential number. It may also represent an
internal SKU number that a merchant assigns to the product.
The second kind of ID is assigned to a product by Google; it is called a
REST ID. The REST ID uniquely identifies a product, and it is an aggregate in
the format online:en:US:1111111111, and includes the offerId as the last
component. This is almost always used as the productId in API calls. The
REST ID consists of 4 parts, separated by colons:
- Channel ("online" or "local")
- Content Language (using the 2-letter designation, for example "en" or "fr")
- Target Country (using the 2-letter designation, for example "US" or "FR")
- Offer ID
This is represented as channel:contentLanguage:targetCountry:offerId, for
example, online:en:US:1111111111 as shown in the table below:
| Attribute | Description | Example | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
id |
Generic use of an ID. | online:en:US:6 | Used inside JSON body of Product to refer to productId. |
offerId |
Another name for item ID. | 6 | String data type, unique identifier for a product's offer. |
| REST ID | A composite string consisting of the channel, language, country and offer ID. | online:en:US:6 | Composite ID used with productId. |
productId |
A REST ID string. | online:en:US:6 | This is a REST ID. |