Summary
If you already have a product feed, you may need to reformat its content to match the format that Google expects. This section explains how you can use an existing feed with your Merchant Center account. You can only do this through the Merchant Center UI.
See the Common issues section for a list of the most common product data issues.
Manual steps
- Choose one of our Supported file formats.
If your existing feed doesn't match a supported format, convert it to one that does.
If items in your existing feed don't match the Product data specification, you can set up feed rules to reformat your product data automatically. You may have to format some feed data manually.
You can remove any information from your feed that Merchant Center doesn't require.
If your existing feed is missing required information, add it before you upload the feed.
Upload a feed to Merchant Center.
Automatic steps
Not available for this process.
Common issues
Here are some common issues you may encounter:
- Item requires a GTIN
- See Find a GTIN to identify the GTIN for your product.
- Incorrect product identifiers
- See About unique product identifiers to determine which of these attributes you need to provide and how to find their values.
- Wait up to 3 days for image crawl to complete
- Google tries to crawl your product images automatically. No action is needed.
- Homepage not claimed
- See Verify and claim URL for Merchant Center.
- URL doesn't match homepage
- The URL provided in your Merchant Center account doesn't match the homepage of your website.
- Landing page can't be crawled
The landing page URL for your product must contain the URL you claimed in your Merchant Center account. In addition, Google's crawler must be able to access your landing page, and the product information on the landing page must match the information in your feed.
See Troubleshoot uncrawlable landing pages for more information.
- Missing or invalid price and availability
See the Price & Availability section of the Product data specification for more information.
- Missing images
Your feed contains products that are missing images.
- Invalid images
Your feed contains products whose images don't meet the required format.
See How to fix: Invalid image for more information.
- Generic images
See How to fix: Generic image for more information.
- Images too small
Your feed contains products whose images are too small to be used.
See How to fix: Image too small for more information.
- Items preemptively disapproved due to data quality violation (watermarks or promotional text)
See the specification for the image link attribute, which includes the requirements for product images.