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A free alternative to MerchantPreflight

MerchantPreflight is a paid ($19/month) store-readiness and feed checker for ecommerce sites. Shipwork is a free, outside-network audit of any site, with the same feed-file check and a watch — and no signup for the free checks.

One crawl of a bounded sample of public pages, from outside your network. Nothing is stored.

What MerchantPreflight does well

It packages store readiness into one place: a misrepresentation checker, a policy checker and builder, a product-feed checker and a product-page auditor, with saved reports. If you want a guided Merchant Center readiness workflow, that is the value.

Where it stops

It is a paid subscription and focused on Merchant Center readiness, so it does not cover the general SEO surface — indexation, canonicals, structured data, AI crawler access, TLS and DNS — and it does not run on a schedule to tell you what changed.

What Shipwork does instead

  • Free and account-free for every check, including the feed-file check.
  • The full technical surface: indexation, canonicals, structured data, sitemaps, AI crawlers, TLS, DNS and email auth.
  • A feed-file check (CSV, TSV, XML) for GTIN, category, condition and identifiers.
  • A daily watch that emails you the day a check changes.

Which should you use?

Use MerchantPreflight if you want a paid, guided readiness workflow with saved reports. Use Shipwork for the free checks, the wider technical surface, and to watch a store over time.

Questions

Is Shipwork a replacement for MerchantPreflight?
For the free checks, largely yes; it is broader on the technical side. It does not offer a guided readiness workflow with saved reports.
Does it check a feed file?
Yes — CSV, TSV and Merchant feed XML, free, with nothing uploaded to us.
Is it free?
The checks are free and need no account. The daily watch is the paid part.