Who to hire for product feed help: developer, feed specialist or agency?

Match the hire to the problem

Hire for the problem you have, not the one the proposal describes.

Before you hire anyone

1. Own the accounts. The Merchant Center and Google Ads accounts should be in your business’s name. Give the person you hire user access, which you can remove later.
2. Write down the problem. The issue names from the Needs attention tab, how many products each affects, and since when.
3. Decide who changes what. If they edit a supplemental feed while your team edits the store, the two copies drift. Agree the fields each side owns.

Questions that separate good candidates

• Which Merchant Center issues have you fixed, and how? Ask for specifics, such as mismatched prices or missing identifiers.
• Will you change data in our store, in the feed, or in a supplemental source? There is no single right answer, but they should have one.
• How will you record what you changed? You will need the list when they leave.
• What will you not be able to fix? A good specialist knows where their reach ends, such as review cool-downs that Google says its own support cannot shorten.

Red flags

Walk away from anyone who guarantees approval, reinstatement or a place in results. Google says free listings do not guarantee your products will be shown, and that its own support cannot shorten a review cool-down. Nobody outside Google can promise more than Google does.

Also be careful with anyone who asks to own the accounts, or who will not say how they change your data.

What you can do before paying anyone

Some feed work is cheaper to do yourself than to explain to someone else. Categorising a catalog is the clearest case: the Bulk Mapper returns a Google category ID for every row of an export, with the uncertain rows flagged for review, at one credit per row. For a single product, the Category Finder is free.

The guide on feed ownership helps decide what stays in-house even after you hire.