AI-generated Key Takeaways
-
This guide outlines common errors when using the Google Merchant API, categorized for easier understanding.
-
Errors can relate to authentication, data conflicts, invalid data, missing information, or exceeding usage limits.
-
Solutions include verifying user permissions, correcting product data, and adjusting request frequency.
-
Refer to linked resources for detailed specifications, usage limits, and account management.
-
This guide aids in troubleshooting and preventing common issues when interacting with the Google Merchant API.
These are the most common errors:
notFound: Item not found.not_inserted: The item could not be inserted.[link] validation/invalid_value for <destinations>: URLs do not belong to your website.- quota/too_many_items: Merchant quota exceeded.
The following is a list of errors in alphabetical order.
auth/account_access_denied
User cannot access account
<account_number> |
|
|---|---|
| Summary | Issued a request targeting an account to which the authenticated user doesn't have access. |
| Common causes | Error in the target merchant ID or forgot to register the user in the Merchant Center. |
| Recommended handling tips | Check that you're targeting the right account or register yourself as a user of the account in Merchant Center (Settings > Users). |
| Prevention tips | NA | User is not an administrator of
account <account_number> |
| Summary | Issued a request to modify an account for which the authenticated user has no admin rights. |
| Common causes | NA |
| Recommended handling tips | Set admin rights for the authenticated user. |
| Prevention tips | NA |
conflict
[productId] Product ID <product
id> is already modified by another entry in the same request for merchant
<merchant> and store code <store code> |
|
|---|---|
| Summary | Attempted multiple conflicting operations at the same time. |
| Common causes | A single batch request contains multiple conflicting operations for the same product, or multiple conflicting operations to the same product were submitted to the Content API at the same time. |
| Recommended handling tips | See prevention tips. |
| Prevention tips | Contain all changes for a given product to a single operation in a batched set of requests. Try to avoid multiple concurrent calls to the Content API for the same merchant and store code, or ensure those calls do not contain overlapping products. |
internalError
Internal error |
|
|---|---|
| Summary | There is a problem with the Google backend. |
| Common causes | NA |
| Recommended handling tips | Retry the request. Contact us if it consistently fails. |
| Prevention tips | NA |
invalid
Invalid channel:
'<channel>' |
|
|---|---|
| Summary | Invalid channel provided as part of a product ID.
For instance: not_a_channel:en:US:sku123. |
| Common causes | NA |
| Recommended handling tips | NA |
| Prevention tips | Make sure your product ID is of the form
channel:languageCode:countryCode:offerId, for example:
online:en:US:sku123. For more information, refer to the reference
documentation for
Products.insert. | [countrycode] Invalid country code:
'<country_code>' |
| Summary | Invalid country code provided as part of a product ID.
For instance: online:en:not_a_country_code:sku123. |
| Common causes | NA |
| Recommended handling tips | NA |
| Prevention tips | Make sure your product ID is of the form
channel:languageCode:countryCode:offerId and that the country
code is a valid
ISO 3166 country code. | [item id] Invalid item
id: '<id>' |
| Summary | Invalid item ID, e.g., sku123 instead
of online:en:US:sku123. |
| Common causes | Specifying an offer ID instead of a product ID
in a GET or DELETE request. |
| Recommended handling tips | NA |
| Prevention tips | Make sure your product ID is of the form
channel:languageCode:countryCode:offerId. | [name] The term '<term>' is not
allowed |
| Summary | Name contains a forbidden word. |
| Common causes | NA |
| Recommended handling tips | Use an allowed name. Refer to the Feed Specification Help Center article for more information. |
| Prevention tips | NA | [price.currency] Please use a currency
that is supported in the target country |
| Summary | Specified a currency that is not available in the target country. |
| Common causes | NA |
| Recommended handling tips | Make sure currency
and country are correctly specified. Refer to the
section
on price in the Feed Specification Help Center article
for more information. |
| Prevention tips | NA | [storeCode] storeCode must be
'online' |
| Summary | Tried to update the price and availability of an
online product via the inventory feed but specified something else than the
special value online as the store ID in the URL. |
| Common causes | NA |
| Recommended handling tips | Change the store ID
to online in the request URL. |
| Prevention tips | Make sure you specify online
for online products and the store ID for local products in all your
inventory queries. | [<attribute>] |
| Summary | The item specified in the square brackets is not valid. |
| Common causes | NA |
| Recommended handling tips | Fix the specification of the problem item, refer to the Feed Specification Help Center article for more information. |
| Prevention tips | NA |
notFound
Item not found |
|
|---|---|
| Summary | The item you tried to get, update or delete doesn't exist. |
| Common causes | Attempting to delete a product that doesn't exist, or not specifying the product ID correctly in the URL for deletion. |
| Recommended handling tips | Get a list of
products using
Products.list and only attempt to get, update, or delete
items appearing there. Make sure you specify the product ID in the form
channel:languageCode:countryCode:offerId, for example:
online:ru:RU:277104-ekb rather than the offer ID, which looks
like this: 277104-ekb. |
| Prevention tips | NA |
not_inserted
The item could not be
inserted. |
|
|---|---|
| Summary | Due to other errors, the product could not be inserted as it would overwrite an existing good entry. |
| Common causes | NA |
| Recommended handling tips | Check the other errors for the same call and address them before attempting to reinsert the new product information. |
| Prevention tips | NA |
quota
too_many_items: Merchant
quota exceeded |
|
|---|---|
| Summary | Too many items uploaded to Google Shopping. |
| Common causes | Products that fail to validate may still be
inserted, if they do not replace an existing valid product. Consider using
the
includeInvalidInsertedItems flag to
Productstatuses.list to make sure your account does not have
an excessive number of invalid products. |
| Recommended handling tips | Check for, and remove, excessive numbers of invalid products as mentioned above. In addition, specify expiration dates when uploading products. When the expiry date is reached, the product is then deleted automatically. Keep in mind the default, and maximum, expiry date is 30 days after product insertion or update. Note: The item quota for a multi-client account is checked against the total number of products in all sub-accounts. If you get this error with a sub-account, make sure that both the sub-account and your MCA has enough product quota. If you have attempted these solutions and are still running out of space for new products in your Merchant Center account, you can request the ability to submit more items in your account. |
| Prevention tips | See Recommended handling tips. | too_many_subaccounts:
Maximum number of subaccounts reached |
| Summary | You have the maximum number of sub-accounts allowed for your multi-client account. |
| Common causes | NA |
| Recommended handling tips | Delete obsolete sub-accounts. If all your accounts are active, you can request the ability to create additional sub-accounts in your MCA. |
| Prevention tips | NA | request_rate_too_high:
Request rate too high. Please reduce your throughput |
| Summary | Requests are being made too quickly; reduce request frequency. |
| Common causes | Refer to the per-minute quotas listed in the published limits. If you exceed these thresholds, you'll receive this error. Sometimes there is a spike in traffic that causes this, or your server expands to a larger number of threads. |
| Recommended handling tips | Reduce total requests sent per minute. |
| Prevention tips | When you receive this error, use programmatic back-off strategies to reduce your request rate to a suitable sustainable level. | daily_limit_exceeded:
merchant quota exceeded |
| Summary | You are making more than the allowed number of requests per day for the given service method. |
| Common causes | Refer to the per-day quotas listed in the published limits. If you exceed these thresholds, you'll receive this error. |
| Recommended handling tips | Reduce total
requests sent per day by combining multiple changes into a single request
when possible. Consider batching changes to products over an appropriate
time period to avoid rapidly changing a product multiple times. For item
updates that can be represented as
microdata
on your website, consider using that approach to limit the number of calls
to the If you still need more daily calls to a given method, please contact us and let us know your Merchant Center ID, which methods you are hitting quota limits on, an estimation of how many calls per day you will need for those methods and why, and we will work with you to get your quota raised. |
| Prevention tips | See Recommended handling tips. | too_many_failed_auths:
Too many failed authentications. |
| Summary | You are making too many batch requests for accounts to which you do not have access. |
| Common causes | Making requests in batches for sub-accounts that have been deleted or for newly created sub-accounts before they are available. |
| Recommended handling tips | Avoid making calls that affect a deleted sub-account. |
| Prevention tips | See Recommended handling tips. | request_too_large |
| Summary | You're sending too many entries per batch request, or
exceeding the custombatch request size limit. |
| Common causes | You can include a maximum of 10,000 entries per
custombatch request, and the compressed transfer size limit is 32Mb. |
| Recommended handling tips | Split the batch into multiple batches that are below the limits, then try again. |
| Prevention tips | We recommend sending no more than 1,000 entries per batch. |
required
[price.value] Required parameter: price.value |
|
|---|---|
| Summary | Specified a price without value. For example:
{ "currency": "USD" } instead of
{ "value": 123, "currency": "USD" }. |
| Common causes | NA |
| Recommended handling tips | Make sure the
parameter, here
price, is well-formed. For example,
price has two mandatory fields: value and
currency. |
| Prevention tips | NA | [product] INSERT request must specify
product |
| Summary | Submitted a custom batch request to the API
containing an entry with "method": "insert" but no product. |
| Common causes | Forgetting to change method to get
or delete. |
| Recommended handling tips | Specify a product to
insert via the product field. |
| Prevention tips | Make sure batch entries with method
insert specify a product, and batch entries with method
get
or
delete specify a product ID. | [productId] DELETE request must specify
productId |
| Summary | Submitted a custom batch request to the API
containing an entry with "method": "delete" but no product
ID. |
| Common causes | Forgetting to change method to
insert. |
| Recommended handling tips | Specify a product
to delete via the productID field. |
| Prevention tips | Make sure batch entries with method
insert specify a product, and batch entries with method
get
or
delete specify a product ID. |
userRateLimitExceeded
User Rate Limit
Exceeded |
|
|---|---|
| Summary | Requests are being made too quickly; reduce request frequency. |
| Common causes | Refer to the HTTP request limits listed in the published limits. If you exceed these thresholds, you'll receive this error. Sometimes there is a spike in traffic that causes this, or your server expands to a larger number of threads. |
| Recommended handling tips | Reduce total requests
sent per minute. Batching multiple method calls to the same service into
a single custombatch request will lower the number of HTTP
requests being made. |
| Prevention tips | When you receive this error, use batching and programmatic back-off strategies to reduce your request rate to a suitable sustainable level. |
validation
[adwords_redirect] |
|
|---|---|
| Summary | Submitted a product whose adwords_redirect
field is not a valid URL. |
| Common causes | NA |
| Recommended handling tips | Make sure the value
of the
adwords_redirect field is a valid URL. |
| Prevention tips | NA | [item] auth/frontend/not_claimed |
| Summary | The merchant's website URL has not been claimed in the Merchant Center. |
| Common causes | NA |
| Recommended handling tips | Claim the URL in the Merchant Center. The detailed procedure for doing that is available in the Help Center. |
| Prevention tips | NA | [energy_efficiency_class]
validation/feed |
| Summary | Specified both energyEfficiencyClass
and
unit pricing for the same product. |
| Common causes | NA |
| Recommended handling tips | Specify only the energy efficiency class or unit pricing, not both. |
| Prevention tips | NA | [item] internal |
| Summary | An internal error. |
| Common causes | NA |
| Recommended handling tips | Retry the request. Contact us if it consistently fails. |
| Prevention tips | NA | [item_group_id] invalid_attribute |
| Summary | Submitted an item with both itemGroupId
and many values for a variant attribute (color, size, pattern or material). |
| Common causes | Specifying more than one size for a product while specifying an item group ID. |
| Recommended handling tips | Submit a different
product for each value of a given variant attribute, such as
size. |
| Prevention tips | NA | [additional_image_link]
invalid_attribute |
| Summary | Submitted more than 10 additional image links. |
| Common causes | NA |
| Recommended handling tips | Limit the number of additional image links to 10. |
| Prevention tips | NA | [<attribute>] invalid_character |
| Summary | Submitted a brand, description or other attribute as a string that doesn't parse using the specified request encoding. |
| Common causes | NA |
| Recommended handling tips | Check the message to find out which attribute is causing the problem, then validate the text encoding of the corresponding value before re-submitting. The API only accepts valid UTF-8 characters. |
| Prevention tips | NA | [<attribute>] invalid_value |
| Summary | Submitted a color, description or other attribute that isn't valid. |
| Common causes | NA |
| Recommended handling tips | Makes sure all attributes adhere to the feed specification, refer to the Feed Specification Help Center article for more information. For GTIN or MPN problems refer to the Unique product identifiers Help Center article. |
| Prevention tips | NA | [<attribute>]
missing_recommended / missing_required |
| Summary | Submitted a product without a required/recommended attribute. |
| Common causes | NA |
| Recommended handling tips | Make sure you include all recommended / required attribute for your product. Refer to the Feed Specification Help Center article for more information. |
| Prevention tips | NA | [link] validation/invalid_value for
<destinations>: URLs do not belong to your website |
| Summary | Submitted a product with a base URL that differs from the URL claimed by the Merchant Center account. |
| Common causes | NA |
| Recommended handling tips | Make sure the URLs for submitted products match the website claimed by Merchant Center. |
| Prevention tips | NA |