Check Your Google Shopping Feed

Frequently asked questions

What is checked — and what is not?

Every product against the Google Merchant Center product data specification (as of October 2026): required attributes (id, title, description, link, image_link, availability, price), lengths, allowed values, the price format "15.00 EUR", sale price below the price, GTIN including the check digit, brand and MPN, variant groups and the attributes for apparel. What only Google can see is not checked: whether images and pages can be reached, whether price and availability match the shop page, shipping and tax, and account-level issues such as an unverified website. So a feed without findings can still get issues in Merchant Center.

Which files can I drop?

CSV (comma or semicolon), TSV or TXT with tabs — the text format Google itself suggests — and XML as RSS 2.0 or Atom 1.0 with the g: attributes. The first row of a table holds the English attribute names (id, title, price …). Encoding UTF-8, UTF-16 or Windows-1252, up to 100 MB.

Where do I get valid GTINs?

GTINs (EAN numbers) are issued by GS1 — GS1 Austria, GS1 Germany, GS1 UK and so on. Your own numbers must be licensed there; a matching check digit alone does not make a number valid. Resold goods carry the manufacturer’s GTIN. If a product has none (one-off, custom-made), leave the field empty and set identifier_exists to no. According to Google, incorrect GTINs lead to disapproval — do not guess.

How do I fix the most common errors?

Most findings come from the shop export: a price with a comma or without a currency ("15.00 EUR" is correct), availability in another language ("lagernd" instead of in_stock), a missing brand or GTIN, image URLs without https. Change the mapping in your shop’s feed plugin or feed template, not the exported file — otherwise the error is back with the next fetch. The CSV report lists every affected product ID with the value found; clicking the attribute opens Google’s rule for it.

Will my product data be uploaded?

No. The file is read and checked in your browser; products, prices and URLs never leave your device, and the report is created in the browser too. The links to Google’s rules only open the help page in question.