Known Issues

This page documents known developer concerns with Merchant API.

UnauthenticatedException random errors

Reported: 2026-03-30 UTC

Multiple customers are experiencing intermittent UnauthenticatedException errors when uploading products and accessing other Merchant Center APIs. Errors occur randomly, even with retries, and affect both initial calls and subsequent attempts. Some connections fail while others succeed in a short amount of time.

No workaround or recommendations so far.

Elevated latency, DEADLINE_EXCEEDED, and INTERNAL_ERROR messages for product and inventories methods

Reported: 2026-03-18 UTC | Resolved: 2026-03-31 UTC

Some users experienced sustained latency and frequent DEADLINE_EXCEEDED or INTERNAL_ERROR messages when using productInputs and regionalInventories methods. The main cause was identified as a backend-level incident affecting processing efficiency.

Resolution: This incident was fully mitigated on March 31, 2026. Following the mitigation, error rates have decreased significantly. If you continue to experience high latency, we recommend verifying your client-side timeouts and reducing request batch sizes.

Throughput issues for product and inventories insert methods

Reported: 2026-01-28 UTC | Last Updated: 2026-03-31 UTC

We received reports of client-side performance issues with throughput while transmitting large amounts of data to the Merchant API. You might see this issue when using client libraries for the following methods:

We've made improvements to increase the performance of various backend systems. If you still encounter this issue, you might need to configure a channel pool to maximize throughput. This bypasses the typical 100-stream limit of a single gRPC channel by managing multiple underlying connections. For more information, see Refactor code for concurrent requests: Improve throughput with channel pools.

Product identifiers with special characters

Reported: 2025-10-03 UTC | Last Updated: 2026-04-08 UTC

Users may encounter issues when managing products where the productId or offerId don't respect the product ID formatting guidelines. Such product IDs might contain special characters — most notably forward slashes (/), colons (:), tildes (~), and percent signs (%). Surfaces like Merchant Center already allow some special characters in product IDs.

Because Merchant API incorporates the product identifier directly into the resource name as part of the URL (for example accounts/{account}/products/{productId}), these characters can interfere with standard URL routing and parsing, leading to unexpected 404 Not Found or 400 Bad Request errors during GET, PATCH, or DELETE operations.

To safely interact with products containing these characters, you must encode the productId or offerId segment of the resource name. The encoding algorithm is Base64URL encoding with no padding. For more information, see accounts.productInputs.name.

Resolved: We rolled out a solution to standardize the behavior across the Merchant API ecosystem. We've added a new field base64_encoded_name to the API responses that provides the pre-encoded resource name, which lets you use the output of a list or get call directly as the input for subsequent updates without performing manual encoding.

Delay after data source creation

Reported: 2024-04-10 UTC | Last Updated: 2024-05-12 UTC

A known delay occurred when trying to insert products, promotions, or reviews immediately after creating a new DataSource. The Data source not found error was returned when trying to insert items within 5 minutes of the data source being created.

Resolved: This delay has been eliminated, allowing for more immediate interaction with newly created data sources.

Any other issue?

Go to our Get help with Merchant API and Give feedback pages for any other issues.