When it comes to Google Merchant issues, there are 2 categories:
- Errors (
): these need to be fixed because they cause product disapprovals
- Warnings (
): these are only recommendations - they will be present in the Diagnostics tab, but the products will still be approved.
Note: most errors and warnings are caused by the product information you have in your shop, and not by the feed itself.
To check the errors and warnings, go to the Diagnostics tab in your Google Merchant account
Here you will see a table with all the information you need such as the name of the error/warning, the affected country, the affected items with a sample list, etc.
If you are using multiple apps for uploading the product data, please click on the ‘Primary feed filter’ and select our feed from the dropdown menu.
Google Merchant errors
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You need to verify and claim your website. Follow the steps from this manual to solve the issue.
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Some or all of your products are missing the shipping information. The product feed does not include any shipping information, so it has to be set up in your Google Merchant account. You can follow this manual to add it.
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Your products are missing some attributes - you can see exactly which one by looking at the warning message.
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In some cases, these attributes are required and not having them results in product disapprovals. For example, the gender, age_group, color, and size attributes are all required for apparel offers, and must be specified in order for these offers to show.
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To fix this, you can add the attributes on the product pages in Shopify or use special feed supported product tags. You can find out more about the supported attributes and the tag formats here.
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Sometimes Google recognizes the products and knows their gtins. This error shows up when your products are marked as custom by having the ‘identifier_exists’ field marked as ‘false’ in the feed, and Google knows the products have gtins.
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To solve this problem you will need to add the gtins for the disapproved products. You can do this by populating the ‘barcode’ field in Shopify.
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Google does not allow product images with watermarks or any overlays.
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There are two solutions for this problem:
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1. You will need to identify the products and change their main image in Shopify.
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2. Go to the app’s dashboard and enable the ‘Use second image’ option and generate the feed to save the changes. The app will then get the second product image as the primary one. You will just have to make sure that the second images don’t have any watermarks. Note that this option applies to all products in the feed - it cannot be used for individual products.
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If you use the shipping weight attribute to calculate the shipping costs, Google will need that information in the feed. If a product does not have it, Google will disapprove the product because it won’t know how much the shipping cost.
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To solve this problem identify the affected products and add the shipping weight in Shopify.
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This means you have products with a price of 0.00. Google does not allow this, so you will need to increase the price to a number higher than 0.
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For mobile devices sold as part of a contract, the price can be 0.
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This error is the most ambiguous one out there - it can mean a lot of things and the key here is to find out what it means in your case.
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To do this, you will need to click on the ‘View samples’ button and open the sample list of affected products. Note that this doesn't necessarily include all the affected items.
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Click on each item and scroll down to ‘Item status’ - here you will sometimes find the specific policy which your product is violating.
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Look if there is a ‘Request review’ button under ‘Actions’ (see image below), and if you have it, click it to appeal the violation. If you don’t have it, there’s nothing you can do, unfortunately.
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Some of your products don’t have images. To fix this, you will need to add the images in Shopify for those products.
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This is an issue due to your shop’s structured data (metadata). This is the data Google reads when crawling your shop.
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The data in the product feed is the exact data you have entered in your Shopify store, so it will always be correct.
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But if Google sees mismatching data between the feed, and the metadata, it won’t know which is correct and will disapprove the product. To check your metadata, you can use this tool
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To solve this problem, you will need to contact your theme developer and let them know about it. They should be able to solve it fairly quickly.
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Your product images are too small to be used by Google. You will need to upload new images in Shopify for the affected products.
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The minimum requirements are:
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- For apparel products: at least 250 x 250 pixels
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- For all other products: at least 100 x 100 pixels
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You are using an incorrect gtin for the products. You will need to change the values in the ‘barcode’ fields in Shopify for the affected values. You can read more about it here.
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This error is caused by some phrases you used in your product titles or descriptions. Google doesn’t allow promotional or extraneous text such as “free shipping” or “great deal” for products targeted to people in Japan.
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To solve this, you will need to remove the promotional messages from the titles or descriptions in Shopify. You can read more about it here.
Google Merchant warnings
Note that warnings do not cause product disapprovals. They are signaling that your product information can be further optimised for the Shopping ads/free listings.
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The product descriptions are too short and you can improve them by making them longer.
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Sometimes, if your products are missing the gtins, Google will show a warning instead of disapproving them. However, their performance will be limited by this, so it is better to populate the ‘barcode’ field in Shopify.
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You have products not covered by your shipping information. You will need to modify or create a new shipping rate. You can use this manual
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If you have the automatic image improvements setting enabled, Google will improve your images by removing any promotional overlays or watermarks.
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You can review the improved images and keep them if they are good. Otherwise, you can change the main image in your Shopify store. More info
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Some of your products don’t have descriptions. To fix this, you will need to add them on the product pages in Shopify.
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The currency used in the feed is not supported in the target country, and you will need to use a different currency. More info
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If you are using Shopify Multi Currency checkout, you can contact us. We can create feeds for each currency you have enabled in your store.
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If you don’t have gtins set up in your Shopify store, our app will generate them. However, they are not official gtins, so Google will show this warning to let you know.
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Even though the generated gtins cause this warning, the product approval rate is much higher than submitting the products without any gtins.
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If you want to correct this, there are two options:
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1. You can look up the manufacturer gtins for the products and add them in the ‘barcode’ field on the product pages in Shopify
- 2. You can disable this feature from the app’s dashboard (note that this might get products disapproved)
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You are using non-standard size values for the targeted markets. To correct this, you will need to use the standard size values for your country of sale. More info
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You have a weird character in your description. You should look for it and delete/replace it.
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Your products are missing some attributes - you can see exactly which one by looking at the warning message.
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To fix this, you can add them on the product pages in Shopify or use special feed supported product tags. You can find out more about the supported attributes and the tag formats here: https://www.adwordsrobot.com/en/help/how-to-set-product-attributes-in-the-shopify-product-feed-app-using-tags