What attributes are required in a Google Merchant Center feed?

Every item requires id, title, description, link, image_link, availability, and price. Most products also require a brand and a global identifier (gtin or mpn), and condition where relevant. Apparel and some categories require additional attributes like color, size, age_group, and gender.

Why are my WooCommerce products disapproved in Merchant Center?

The most common causes are: a price or availability mismatch between the feed and the landing page, a missing GTIN or brand, an image that is too small or a placeholder, and pages that aren't crawlable. Google revisits your landing page, so the feed and the live page must agree.

Can Google fetch a product feed automatically?

Yes. In Merchant Center you can add a scheduled feed that fetches a hosted file (XML or delimited) at a URL on a recurring schedule. This is the lowest-maintenance option: you publish one always-current feed URL and Google pulls it on its own cadence.

Guides / Google Merchant feed

How to Create a Google Merchant Center Feed from WooCommerce

A product feed is how your WooCommerce catalog gets into Google Shopping, free product listings, and Performance Max campaigns. Get the attributes right and approval is routine; get them wrong and items quietly get disapproved. Here’s the practical version.

What a Merchant Center feed is

A feed is a structured list of your products — one row or item per product — with a defined set of attributes Google understands. You can submit it as XML (RSS/Atom), a delimited text file, or via the Content API. The cleanest approach for most stores is a single hosted feed URL that Google fetches on a schedule, so it’s always current.

Required attributes

These must be present on every item or the product won’t list:

Attribute	What it is
`id`	Unique, stable product ID (your SKU works well).
`title`	Product name, ideally with key attributes.
`description`	Accurate product description.
`link`	Canonical product page URL.
`image_link`	Main product image (meets Google’s size rules).
`availability`	in_stock, out_of_stock, preorder, or backorder.
`price`	Price with currency; must match the landing page.

Strongly recommended attributes

brand and gtin (or mpn) — identifiers tie you to known products and improve match rates.
condition — new, refurbished, or used.
product_type and google_product_category — classification.
color, size, age_group, gender — required for apparel and variants.
shipping and tax — where not configured at the account level.

What a feed item looks like (XML)

<item>
  <g:id>ABC-123</g:id>
  <title>TrailMaster Waterproof Backpack 30L</title>
  <description>30L waterproof hiking backpack with laptop sleeve.</description>
  <link>https://yourstore.com/product/trailmaster-backpack/</link>
  <g:image_link>https://yourstore.com/wp-content/uploads/backpack-1.jpg</g:image_link>
  <g:availability>in_stock</g:availability>
  <g:price>89.00 USD</g:price>
  <g:brand>TrailMaster</g:brand>
  <g:gtin>0012345678905</g:gtin>
  <g:condition>new</g:condition>
</item>

Three ways to generate the feed

1. A feed plugin

Dedicated WooCommerce feed plugins map your products to Merchant attributes and output a hosted file. They work, but many are heavy, run scheduled cron jobs that strain shared hosting, and store a second copy of your catalog that can drift out of sync.

2. The Content API

The most powerful and the most work: you push updates to Google programmatically. Best for large catalogs with engineering resources.

3. A live, always-current feed endpoint

Instead of generating and storing a file, serve the feed straight from your catalog. ProductStream exposes feed-ready JSON and XML endpoints that reflect your live products — so the feed Google fetches is never stale, and you point Merchant Center at one URL and forget it. See how it works.

The disapprovals to avoid

Price/availability mismatch. Google re-checks your landing page. The feed and the live page must agree, including currency and sale prices.
Missing GTIN/brand. For products that have identifiers, omitting them limits eligibility.
Image problems. Placeholder images, logos, or images below the minimum size get items rejected.
Uncrawlable landing pages. If Googlebot can’t fetch the product URL, the item is disapproved.

Tip: the same complete product data that satisfies Merchant Center also powers rich results and AI answers. If you haven’t yet, start with rich Product schema and AI search visibility.

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