Google Merchant Center
What is Google Merchant Center?
Google Merchant Center is the free platform that holds a shop’s product data: price, availability, image, GTIN. From there the products reach shopping ads, free product listings and Performance Max campaigns. The data arrives as a feed or is read from the product pages themselves. Google checks it against your site and its policies, and rejects the items where something does not match.
Example
A shop uploads 1,400 products. Nine hundred are approved. The diagnostics give three reasons: 320 items with a price mismatch, 140 with no GTIN, and 40 whose image carries a watermark.
The mismatch comes from a promotion. The feed says €49.90; the page, now that the promotion has ended, says €59.90. The feed refreshes once a day and prices change more often than that. The fix has two halves: refresh more often, and put structured data on the product page so Google can read price and availability between refreshes. Watermarks and “sale” banners burned into images are not allowed. The GTIN comes from the manufacturer, and where a product genuinely has none — something handmade, say — that is declared rather than left blank.
Why it matters for a business
Merchant Center is the gate to shopping ads and to free product listings. A rejected item is not less visible; it is absent. The heavier case is an account-level suspension for a mismatch between the data and the site: every product ad stops at once, and getting back in means a review that takes days.
So the feed belongs to the shop rather than sitting beside it: availability, the price including VAT, delivery times and the returns policy come from the same place the buyer reads them.
What to ask
- How many times a day does the feed refresh, and what happens on the day a promotion starts?
- Do the price and availability on the page match the feed?
- Are the required attributes for clothing filled in — size, colour, age group, gender?
- Is the site verified, and are the shipping and returns settings complete?
- Who watches the rejected items, and how quickly are they fixed?
We keep the feed, the account and the campaigns in step as part of Google Ads.