This page documents known developer concerns with Merchant API.
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:
accounts.productInputs.insertaccounts.products.localInventories.insertaccounts.products.regionalInventories.insert
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.