Announcing the Merchant API Beta, the new version of the Content API for Shopping

Today we're announcing the release of the Merchant API Beta. This is the newest version of the Content API for Shopping which comes with exciting new features. The Merchant API is a redesign of the Content API for Shopping which can help you showcase your products with new features, modular design with isolated sub-API updates, and improved alignment with Google's API improvement proposals. We invite you to try out the Merchant API Beta to provide early feedback so we can improve the Merchant API for you.

For more information, we highly recommend reviewing the launch status for Merchant API Beta expectations and see the following sections.

Highlights:
You can find a complete list of features in the release notes in the GRPC/REST reference sections and accompanying compatibility guides, but here are the highlights:

• Sub APIs with new features at launch: We are excited to announce an initial set of sub apis which comes with new features:
  • Data Sources: Allows multiple API feed creation and management, improved management of supplemental feeds via creation with linking to primary feeds, and support for other shopping feeds such as promotions.
  • Notifications: Receive push notifications for changes to a given account and product data.
  • Products: Unifying Product & ProductStatuses resources to streamline your workflow, new functionality to support inserting products into non API data sources.
  • Inventory: Improved management with the ability to remove in-store or regional inventories for your products.
  • Accounts: New terms of signing (ToS) functionality via the API and accessing account issues with multi-language support.
  • Local Feeds Partnership: For Point-of-sale data providers, more granular inventory management with availability status submissions and feed labels for inventory.
  • Promotions: Simplified promotion statuses with improved details and support for custom promotion attributes for faster iterations on new features.
  • Quota: Additional fields such as version, sub-api, and adjustments visible through the API to manage your quotas more efficiently.
  • Reports: A new NonProductPerformanceView table which provides insights into non-product performance data such as data on links leading to merchants’ homepage.
• Merchant API is the future. Going forward, we will start launching new features primarily for the Merchant API which will have the newest Merchant Center features. We recommend you start using the Merchant API and would love to hear your feedback to help shape the future.
• More features are on the way! Today's release contains many new improvements. Currently, there isn’t feature completeness between the Content API and Merchant API. We will have more features upcoming which are based on establishing parity, your feedback, and completely new features such as creation of file feeds with the Data source Merchant API.

Learn more and check out the following resources:

• Access our Merchant API developer website to discover the Merchant API.
• Review our Quickstart guide and Compatibility guides: to ramp up your understanding with how to start your integration with the Merchant API.
• Learn more with our Merchant API release notes in the GRPC/REST reference sections to view our launched and future new features.
• Check out our new Client Libraries and Samples to help speed up your implementations.
• Contact our API support team for any issues or questions.
• Help shape the future by providing feedback: Submit any feedback or suggestions.

Benji Rothman, on behalf of the Content API for Shopping Team