How to Fix Common Google Shopping Errors

To get your products successfully listed on Google Shopping, Google Merchant Center requires that your product data meets a set of minimum specifications. If these are not met, Google Merchant Center will list a series of errors, warnings and notifications that may affect the listing of your products. Particularly for beginners, this growing list can often seem overwhelming. 

Google Merchant Center does provide tools to diagnose and help you solve these problems to ensure that your products are approved.  This guide will take you through the most common errors, warnings and notifications that our customers experience at a feed level and show you how to fix them using ShoppingFeeder. 

The focus of this guide is on Item issues in Google Merchant Center i.e. problems that affect an individual item. Such problems can range from an error processing an item in the feed to data quality and policy violations. To view the list of item errors and warnings and Diagnose the problems, you’ll need to login to your Merchant Center Account, click Products -> Feeds and then select the feed for which you wish to view the issues.

Tip: Issues at the Item level only affect individual products. So if you have 200 items of which only 3 have issues, the remaining 197 products will still be able to be successfully listed on Google Shopping.

Errors

Google Merchant Center Errors are indicated by a red triangle and are the most serious kinds of issues, since these prevent an item from being successfully listed.  

Insufficient product identifiers: Missing two out of three attributes [GTIN, brand, mpn].

Missing Product identifiers are the most common error experienced by stores when trying to list their products on Google Shopping. 

In order to successfully get up and running with Google Product listings, Google requires that you provide multiple unique identifiers. This information helps Google provide a better experience to shoppers and increase the visibility of your ads. 

GTINs (Global Trade Item Numbers) vary in length and differ by country. Not all products have a GTIN assigned but for those that do, you’ll need to submit this number, otherwise Google may disapprove your products. 

You’ll often find the GTIN on the packaging of the product, or you can ask the supplier for the number. Note: you encounter different types of GTINs depending on region and product type. 

• UPC (in North America / GTIN-12): 12-digit number (8-digit UPC-E codes should be converted to 12-digit UPC-A codes)
• EAN (in Europe / GTIN-13): 13-digit number
• JAN (in Japan / GTIN-13): 8 or 13-digit number
• ISBN (for books): 13-digit number (ISBN-10 values should be converted to ISBN-13)
• ITF-14 (for multipacks / GTIN-14): 14-digit number

What if my products don't have GTINs?

If your product doesn't have a GTIN, you can submit both a brand and mpn attribute with the offer. You can enter these attributes by editing the individual offer on the Manage Offers page.