Feed overview (legacy)

  • Inventory data is transmitted to the Actions Center through feed files, which define the services, availability, and scope of the services.

  • The Merchants feed is mandatory for all integrations, and the Services and Availability feeds are required for end-to-end integration.

  • An optional Conversion feed is available to describe conversion metrics.

  • Feeds must be uploaded with the PROCESS_AS_COMPLETE processing instruction, and PROCESS_AS_INCREMENTAL is deprecated.

  • Feeds can be uploaded in either protocol buffer 3 (pb3) format or JSON format, with JSON recommended, and gzip compression is suggested.

This section specifies the feed files used to transmit your inventory data to the Actions Center. The contents of your feeds defines which services you are providing, what services are available, and when the services are available.

Follow the legacy starter integration guide to learn how to share these feeds with us.

The structure of the inventory feeds are defined by the Google Maps Booking API.

The following feed is mandatory across any integration:

In addition, the 2 following feeds are mandatory for end-to-end integration.

  • Services feed: Describes the services provided by your merchants.
  • Availability feed: Lists availability slots of services provided by your merchants.

Some optional feeds are also specified:

  • Conversion feed: Describes conversion metrics that were generated by your partnership with the Actions Center.

Some fields in these feeds are required and some are optional. Any field marked as optional can be left out of the feed when empty.

The feeds format is described using protocol buffer 3 syntax. You have the option to upload the feeds file as a binary serialization of the protocol buffer data in pb3 format or in a derived JSON format. We recommend uploading the feeds in JSON format.

We recommend using gzip to compress feeds prior to upload.

This guide is specific to the Actions Center protocol buffers. For general information on how to use the protocol buffers to generate a pb3 file, here is an example in Java.