What Merchant Center actually checks
Merchant Center judges your products on three levels, and the Diagnostics page mixes them together, which is why the reports confuse people. Feed data is what you submit: title, description, price, availability, image, brand. Landing pages are what Google fetches independently to verify the feed — the price and availability on the page must match the feed exactly. The account is your store itself: contact information, shipping and return policies, and whether the site looks like a real business.
Outcomes come in two severities. A disapproval removes the product from Shopping ads and free listings until fixed. A warning (limited performance) keeps the product live but throttles it — and since enforcement tightened through 2025 into 2026, issues that used to warn now disapprove. Price and availability mismatches between feed and landing page get the harshest treatment: preemptive disapproval, because Google assumes the shopper would be misled.
The required attributes, translated
Strip away the specification language and the requirements fit in one paragraph. Every product needs an identifying title under 150 characters with no promotional text and no all-caps shouting. It needs a description of real sentences about the product itself, not your shipping policy. It needs a price above zero that matches the landing page to the cent, an availability value that matches whether the page can actually be bought, a clear product image with no watermark or placeholder graphics, and a brand naming the manufacturer. Categories should be specific, not generic.
Two attributes deserve honesty. GTINs matter enormously in categories that require them, but a GTIN is a feed-only value — no outside checker can see it, so any tool that claims to validate yours from your public catalogue is guessing. The same applies to shipping and tax configuration. Shipwork deliberately does not report on what it cannot see; a checker that invents problems is worse than none.
The five mistakes behind most rejections
- Promotional text in the title. SALE, FREE SHIPPING, percentage-off and repeated exclamation marks are prohibited. Put the offer in a promotion or sale price, never in the title.
- All-caps titles from supplier imports. Bulk catalogues arrive shouting, Shopify displays them fine, Google disapproves them. Sentence case, keeping genuine acronyms.
- Missing or one-sentence descriptions. A required attribute. Thin supplier copy duplicated across dozens of retailers also weakens matching — write a couple of real sentences per product.
- Price or availability mismatch with the landing page. Multi-currency rounding, expired sales still in the feed, and out-of-stock products left purchasable are the classic triggers. Even a one-cent difference counts.
- Landing pages Google cannot use. A 500 to crawlers, a redirect to a collection, or a renamed handle — all read as missing or unavailable, and the product is disapproved even though it opens fine for you.
How to audit your catalogue in an afternoon
- Open Merchant Center, Products, Diagnostics. Sort by affected product count — one fix type often clears hundreds of items at once.
- For each issue type, open two or three affected products and compare every field against your Shopify admin, not against what you remember setting.
- Fix the pattern, not the product: a bad title template, an import mapping, a sale that never ended. Product-by-product fixes do not survive the next import.
- Recheck with an outside read of your live catalogue, because Diagnostics describes the last crawl, not the current state.
- Request a review where Merchant Center offers one, and expect 3 to 5 business days for reprocessing. A fixed product still reads as failing until Google refetches it.
Why one clean audit is not enough
Catalogues rot. Imports reintroduce caps, sales expire, handles get renamed, theme updates strip markup. The merchants who stay approved treat the feed as a living thing: a weekly glance at Diagnostics and a daily outside scan that records exactly when something started failing. Finding out the morning it breaks beats finding out the month you notice revenue dip.
Shipwork reads your entire public Shopify catalogue and flags every product that breaks the data-level rules — titles, descriptions, prices, images, brands, availability and duplicates. Free, no account, no signup — paste your store address.
Check my productsQuestions
- Why are my products disapproved when my store looks fine?
- Because Merchant Center judges the feed data and the landing page together, not the store as you see it. The most common invisible causes are title formatting, thin descriptions, and price or availability mismatches with the page.
- How long does Google take to approve fixed products?
- Typically 3 to 5 business days after a recrawl. The Diagnostics status keeps showing the old failure until Google refetches, so a fixed product can look broken for a while.
- Do warnings matter if products still show?
- Yes. Limited-performance products get fewer impressions, and enforcement has been tightening — warnings become disapprovals if ignored.
- Can I check my catalogue without Merchant Center access?
- The data-level rules can be checked from your public catalogue alone, which is what the free feed check does. Feed-only fields like GTIN need Merchant Center itself.
Keep reading