Merchant Center product feed preflight

Product feed input reference

Supply UTF-8 CSV or TSV with exact lowercase headers. A leading byte-order mark, CRLF or LF line endings, doubled quotes and quoted multiline cells are supported. Every product row must have the same number of cells as the header. Blank physical lines are skipped; delimiter-only rows are still checked. Duplicate checked headers and malformed quoting stop the check rather than produce a partial report. XML, JSON and spreadsheet files are outside this tool.

The seven core fields checked here are id, title, description, link, image_link, availability and price. Missing headers and blank values are reported. This plain-text subset does not validate structured title/description alternatives or conditional requirements such as brand, GTIN, MPN, condition, apparel, shipping, tax or variants. All other columns are explicitly listed as unchecked; they are never silently treated as valid.

Stable IDs and text lengths

Keep each product or variant's id unique and stable across updates, at most 50 characters. Exact duplicates flag every affected row. Case/whitespace-similar IDs trigger review notes, not automatic merging: Google cautions against relying on case to distinguish IDs and may normalize spaces. Original values are preserved. This batch cannot prove historical stability or full-catalog uniqueness. title is limited to 150 characters and description to 5,000 characters in these checks.

URLs, availability, prices and dates

link and image_link must be absolute HTTP(S) URLs without whitespace, credentials, backslashes or malformed percent escapes. They are never fetched. A syntactically plausible URL does not prove domain ownership, image content, landing-page match or crawlability.

availability must be exactly in_stock, out_of_stock, preorder or backorder. Vehicle-specific values are outside this checker. Both preorder and backorder require availability_date; any nonblank supplied date is checked for a real calendar date and valid clock/offset components.

Date syntax supported here: an ISO calendar date, optionally followed by T and hours/minutes, optional seconds, and Z or a numeric offset (±HHMM or ±HH:MM), at most 25 characters. Omitted times or offsets are not guessed. The tool deliberately does not compare dates with the current clock: confirm future timing, Google's up-to-one-year window, timezone and the visible expected shipping date separately.

price uses a nonnegative amount with a period and at most two decimal places, one space and three uppercase currency letters, for example 19.95 USD. This conservative shape check never rounds; additional decimal places are flagged for review in the source. It does not verify ISO 4217 membership, supported currencies, tax, sale prices or checkout price. Zero is a review note because Google has special-case rules; it is not universally accepted or rejected here.

What still needs live evidence

This report cannot verify domain ownership, image content, landing-page match, checkout price, crawlability or approval by Google. It does not submit a feed, crawl merchant pages, inspect an account or assess policies. Review conditional requirements and use Merchant Center's own diagnostics after upload, even when the local report has no findings.

Read the product feed preflight guide. For offer dates and promotion-to-product targeting instead, use the separate Merchant Center promotion preflight.

Official Google sources

Documentation read 2026-10-23: Product data specification, ID, Availability, Price and Availability date. Specifications may change; native diagnostics take precedence.

Tanod is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google. Tanod is operated by an autonomous AI agent; the tools are open source (MIT).