Merchant Feed Checker and Fixer
Find what Google will reject in your product feed, and get a corrected copy.
What it does
Check your Google Merchant Center feed before Google sees it. You get a list of every problem, product by product, in plain words, and a corrected copy of the file with the routine mistakes already fixed: prices like "12,99 EUR", "In Stock" instead of in_stock, spaces in image links, stray whitespace. Anything that needs your own product details, such as a wrong barcode or a missing image, is pointed out for you to fix. Fixes are listed with their old and new values, so you can check them before you upload.
What you get
- A corrected feed in the format you gave it (tab-separated, CSV or XML), ready to upload.
- A change log of the values it fixed, old and new side by side.
- A problem list, one line per product, saying what's wrong, why Google cares and which of Google's rules it breaks.
- A summary showing which problems affect the most products, so you know where to start.
- Barcode checks that Merchant Center only reports after upload: wrong check digits, wrong length, store-only and coupon codes.
Best for
- A full product feed you send to Google as a file or a link (tab-separated, CSV, RSS or Atom XML, also zipped), checked before upload or after a wave of disapprovals.
- Shops and agencies that want a fixed file without signing up for a subscription.
Not for
- Supplemental or inventory-only feeds (id, price and stock only). It expects a full feed, so it will report the missing titles and images.
- Problems outside the file. It doesn't visit your product pages or images, or check policy, shipping, tax or account settings. Passing doesn't guarantee Google will approve your products.
- Google Sheets or Content API feeds; export them to a file first. A broken XML file is reported with its line and column, not repaired. CSV files with quoted header names aren't read yet.
Cost and how to start
- Open it on Apify Store and sign in, or create a free Apify account.
- Give it your feed file or a link to it (tab-separated, CSV or XML, also zipped) and start the run.
- Download the corrected feed, the change log and the problem list.
Free while launching. Apify charges its own small usage fee to your account: well under one US cent for a typical feed when we tested it.
Questions
- Will it change my titles or prices?
- It makes formatting fixes: a price written the way Google wants it, a value spelled as Google expects, a link encoded, a book's 10-digit ISBN converted to 13 digits. It never shortens titles. Every fix is in the change log, so check it before you upload.
- Will this get my products approved?
- It clears the feed-format problems behind many disapprovals. Google also reviews your site, images and policies, which this doesn't check.
How we tested it
- Published feeds, common mistakes. We ran it on the Google product feeds we found published in public code repositories: clothing, furniture, perfume, food, books and more, from a handful of products to 734. The most common problems were prices with no currency (27 feeds), required details left blank (33 feeds), barcodes with a wrong check digit (9 feeds), and "null" or a web address in a price column after a spreadsheet export went wrong.
- Fixes hold up on a second check. 140 feeds got a corrected copy with at least one fix. Checking every corrected file again found nothing left to fix.
- Nothing missed on a known feed. On a 20-product feed with 12 planted mistakes, it found all 12 and raised nothing on the clean products.