First, unzip the archive that you have downloaded from yagendoo.com. It contains a folder with two zip files: The Virtuemart Merchant Connect component and the Google Merchant Center plugin.

In the Joomla! Admin panel, click on "Extensions > Install/Deinstall".

Click on "Select file" and select the file named "yagendoo_vmmerchant_2.0.zip" from the folder you have just unzipped. Confirm the installation by clicking on "Upload and install".
If the installation was successful, a message should appear confirming it.

Note: If an error message appears, ensure that you have set the necessary write rights for all files and folders in your Joomla! directory.

The Yagendoo Virtuemart Merchant Connect component is located in the "Components" menu.

After selecting the component, you will be redirected to the "Dashboard". It provides with a small statistic on the products available for your feeds (orange) and an import and export feature (green).

In addition, you will find a horizontal navigation bar with several tabs (red). In "Products", for example, you can prepare your products for use in feeds. You will find an overview on these feeds on the "Feeds" tab. Each feed requires a respective plugin. You can see and maintain all plugins on the "Apps" tab (wrench).

Each tab will be discussed within this documentation.

To be able to use the Yagendoo Merchant Connect module productively, you have to install at least one Merchant Plugin.

The Google Merchant plugin is already included and will be used as an example for this documentation.

The plugin is installed the same way as the component. Consequently, go back to step 1 of this documentation and instead of the component, select the Google plugin, i.e. the file named plg_vmmerchant_google_merchant_2.0.0.zip.

After the installation, change to the "Yagendoo Virtuemart Merchant Connect" component and select the "Apps" tab (wrench). The plugin you have just installed should now appear.

Now, you only have to publish the plugin to be able to use it. To do so, just click on the red icon in the "Publish" column. The icon should now be green.

Some additional information is required before your products can be imported to the feeds. For example, an MPN and GTIN.

To complete this number, change to the "Products" tab (red). Here, you can enter the numbers in the respective fields (orange). To save the values you entered, click the small disc icon (green) on the extreme right. After saving your changes, you should see a small green icon in the respective column.

You also have the option to enter an alternative product title. If you change the title in the respective field, this new title will be used in the feeds instead of the regular title set in Virtuemart.
Note: The feeds will now use the alternative title. Your Virtuemart product sites will of course remain unchanged.

Hint: The following feature is only available the Joomla 2.5 & VM2 Version of the extension.
In some countries or for some products it is necessary to add a google-product-category to the feed. If you want to do this switch to the "categories" tab inside Merchant Connect component. Here you will see a list with all your Virtuemart categories. You can assign a Google-category to each Virtuemart-category by entering it into the "Google Category" field (marked red). After you entered the category click on the little floppy-disk icon to save.
This google-categories will automatically be assigned to the products which are in the corresponding virtuemart-category.
Please be sure to enter only valid Google-Categories. If you don't know what to enter please click the link located right besides the search-field (marked green).

After installing a feed plugin and preparing your products accordingly, you can continue creating a feed. To do so, change to the "Feeds" tab (red). All the feeds you have created will be listed here.

To add a new feed, click on the "New" icon (orange) on the upper right. A form appears, allowing you to define several settings for your feed.

Enter a name and a description for your feed (orange) and select the categories of the products you want to list in this field. Next, select "Yes" in the "Approve" sequence. To save your settings, click on the "Save" icon (red) on the upper right.

The feed you have just created should now appear in the table.

After creating a new feed, a link to the respective feed URL will appear in the table. For the Google Merchant feed, for example, click on the "Feed URL" link (red) in the "Google Merchant" column. The URL of the feed will now appear in the address bar of your browser. You can now use this URL for Google or any other provider.

The Merchant plugins offers several options to customize the feeds. To change the options, first select the "Apps" tab (wrench) [red] and then select the titel of the plugin (orange).

You can find a documentation of the individual options in the documentation of the respective plugin.

Sometimes it is useful to import or export data to the extension. For example if you want to create a csv-files with much data offline and than import it.

To export or import data please switch to the Dashboard-Tab at first. Here you will find two links to export data. With a click on the "Export Product Data" (marked red) link you will get a csv-file containing all the data from the products-tab.
With a click onto the "Export Feed Data" (marked green) you will receive a csv-file containing all your configured feeds.
After downloading you can edit these CSV-files with any text-editor or csv-capable application you like.
To import data from a CSV-file select the file by clicking on the "Select file" button (marked orange). After you have chosen your file you have to set if this file contains product- or feed-data. You can do this by using the radio-buttons below the file-input field (marked_blue).
To finally import the data just click onto the "Send" button.

The Google Merchant Center plugin offers several options (orange) that will be discussed in the following.

To begin with, you can select the country for which your feed or your shop is created. Afterwards, you can select a description text for your shop. Furthermore, you can select a customer group that should be taken into account in the feed. You normally keep the default value.

Google requires you to enter the condition of your products; the next dropdown field can be used for this purpose. Here, you can select whether or not child products should be displayed in your feed.

The Yes/No fields in the next step allow you to activate or deactivate several fields for the feed.

After this, you will find a series of fields that can be displayed in the feed but are not always featured consistently in Virtuemart. To solve this, you can select the respective field of your Virtuemart version (such as color, size, genre, and so on).

The next two dropdown lists allow you to set whether or not customer reviews will be featured in the feed.
The last field allows you to detail where your products will appear in the Google Merchant Center.