Preorders and Google Merchant Center

Use this guide if you want your preorder products to show as preorders in Google Merchant Center, with the date they’ll ship. STOQ doesn’t connect to Google Merchant Center directly, but it does hold the ship dates you set, and you can map them into the product feed you send to Google.

Does STOQ sync to Google Merchant Center?

No. STOQ doesn’t integrate with Google Merchant Center and doesn’t automatically send your preorder dates to it. Nothing in STOQ pushes data to Google.

What STOQ does give you is the ship dates you set on your offers, which you can read out of STOQ and add to whatever builds your Google feed. The feed stays yours to generate; STOQ just supplies the dates.

What Google needs for a preorder

Google’s preorder listing uses two product attributes in your feed. STOQ doesn’t set these for you, so whatever builds your feed has to add them:

Attribute	Value
availability	preorder
availability_date	the date the product ships or becomes available, in ISO 8601 (for example 2026-03-15T13:00:00-08:00)

For Google’s exact current requirements, check Google Merchant Center Help; these attributes are owned by Google, not STOQ.

Where STOQ keeps the ship date

There are two places to read a preorder’s ship date out of STOQ. For a feed, the API is the better source, because it gives you the date as data rather than display text.

The STOQ API (recommended for a feed)

The STOQ API exposes each offer’s shipping settings, including the ship date you set, as structured data you can read and map to availability_date. This is the cleanest source when you build or script your own feed. See Preorder API and the developer docs.

The published Shopify metafield

STOQ also publishes a shipping_text metafield on each preorder variant, in the namespace restockrocket_production. This is the shipping line shoppers see, so it’s display text, not a clean date: it can read “Ships by 15 March”, “Ships within 14 days of your order”, or a custom message with no date at all, depending on how you set the offer’s shipping. Use it only if your feed tool reads Shopify metafields and you’re prepared to parse that text; otherwise prefer the API.

Add it to your feed

However you generate the feed you send to Google, whether a feed app, Shopify’s Google and YouTube channel, or a custom feed, do the mapping there:

1. Identify your preorder products (for example by the STOQ offer they’re in, or a product tag you apply to them).
2. For those products, set availability to preorder.
3. Set availability_date from the ship date you read out of STOQ.
4. Re-generate or refresh the feed whenever you change a ship date in STOQ, since STOQ won’t update Google for you.

Note

STOQ has no setting that turns this on. If a feed shows your preorder dates in Google, it’s because the feed tool was configured to include them, not because STOQ sent them.

FAQ

Can STOQ send my preorder dates to Google automatically?

No. There’s no direct integration. You read the ship dates from STOQ (the API is the cleanest source) and add them to the feed you send to Google yourself.

Which date does STOQ give me?

The ship date you set in the offer’s shipping settings. The API returns it as data; the storefront shipping_text metafield shows it as the line shoppers read, which may be a message rather than a date.

Does the shipping_text metafield work as availability_date?

Not reliably. It’s the display line (“Ships by 15 March”, “Ships in 2 to 3 weeks”), so it isn’t always a date and isn’t in the ISO format Google wants. Use the API for the actual date and format it yourself.

What happens if I change a ship date in STOQ?

Your storefront updates, but your Google feed doesn’t until you regenerate or refresh it. Rebuild the feed after changing a date so Google shows the new one.

Will the Preorder button show the right date to shoppers?

Yes, on your storefront that’s controlled by the offer’s shipping settings. See Show a preorder shipping timeline. Google Merchant Center is separate and needs the feed mapping above.

Related articles

Show a preorder shipping timelineSet the ship date and message shoppers see on the product page.

Preorder APIRead offers and their shipping dates as data for your own feed.

Preorders on external sales channelsHow preorders behave on Shop, Google, Facebook and Instagram.