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Fix Google Merchant Center Feed Errors

By Selling Fee Tools team ·

Google Merchant Center rejects or limits products whose feed doesn’t match its product data specification. Most problems come from a short list of attributes. This guide goes through them, following Google’s Merchant Center Help pages, and you can check a whole feed at once with our free validator.

The attributes every product needs

Each product in the feed needs these, or Google rejects it:

  • id: unique per product, up to 50 characters. Use the SKU where you can. Two products with the same id is an error.
  • title: up to 150 characters.
  • description: up to 5,000 characters.
  • link: the product page on your site.
  • image_link: the main image URL.
  • availability: exactly one of in_stock, out_of_stock, preorder or backorder.
  • price: a number with an ISO currency code, such as 15.00 USD.

Feeds can be tab-delimited text or XML (RSS 2.0 or Atom 1.0), and attribute names are in English with underscores: image_link, not “Image Link”.

Product identifiers: GTIN, brand and MPN

Most new products need a GTIN, or an MPN together with the brand.

  • A GTIN must have the right number of digits and a correct check digit. Typos and spreadsheets dropping leading zeros are the usual causes of “invalid GTIN”.
  • brand must be the real brand. Google says not to submit placeholders such as N/A, Generic or No brand.
  • If a product genuinely has no GTIN or MPN, such as a handmade item, set identifier_exists to no and leave the brand empty if it has none. Setting identifier_exists to no on a product that does have a GTIN can get it disapproved.

Price and sale price

  • Write prices as a number and a currency code, with no currency symbol: 15.00 USD, not $15.
  • A price of 0 is only allowed for phones sold with a contract or goods sold with a subscription.
  • sale_price must use the same currency as price and be lower than it; price is the regular price.
  • sale_price_effective_date is two ISO 8601 dates separated by “/”, such as 2026-11-27T00:00-0500/2026-11-30T23:59-0500.

Availability dates

  • preorder needs an availability_date, the date the item becomes available.
  • backorder should have one too.
  • Dates use ISO 8601, for example 2027-02-24T11:07+0100.

Titles and images

  • Keep promotional text such as “free shipping”, “sale” or “% off” out of titles; use the sale_price or promotion attributes instead.
  • Avoid titles written in all capital letters.
  • image_link must be an accepted format: JPEG, WebP, PNG, non-animated GIF, BMP or TIFF. SVG, AVIF and HEIC aren’t accepted.
  • Google uses up to 10 additional images per product.
  • condition, where you send it, must be new, refurbished or used.

Check your whole feed

The Google Merchant Center feed validator reads CSV, TSV and XML feeds in your browser, with no upload and no product limit. It flags every issue above with the product’s row or item number, a severity and a suggested fix, and exports the issue list as CSV.

To check GTINs on their own, paste the list into the GTIN check digit calculator, which also restores leading zeros dropped by spreadsheets. Selling on Shopify? The Shopify CSV validator catches errors in the product file before they reach your store and your feed.

Sources: Google Merchant Center Help, product data specification and feed file formats, listed on the validator and on our methodology page.