What Is a Product Feed?

Google's product data specification names the fields it will not do without: id, title, description, link, image link, availability and price. Availability has to be one of in stock, out of stock, preorder or backorder. Price has to carry a currency in the standard ISO 4217 format.

There are limits on the fields too. An id runs to 50 characters, a title to 150, a description to 5,000. Titles are the one worth caring about, because in Shopping the title is doing the job a keyword does in Search.

Brand is listed as optional but required for new products, apart from movies, books and musical recordings, and it is capped at 70 characters. GTIN is strongly recommended when your product has one. MPN is only required when a product has no manufacturer-assigned GTIN. Condition is only required when the item is used or refurbished.

Read that list again and notice what it means in practice. Plenty of disapprovals come down to a field somebody read as optional. Google's specification says accurate, correctly formatted data is what prevents disapprovals and display problems, and it means it literally.

Scaley AI is our own product, and it works on top of a feed that already exists. It tags every SKU by margin and velocity, pushes those tags into your Merchant Center custom labels every day, and calls out the products losing you money. It prepares each change with the reason attached and writes nothing to your account until you approve it. It does not watch your disapprovals - Merchant Center already does that, and we leave it there.

We are not a feed tool and we do not pretend to be. If you need to remap and rewrite attributes for several channels in one place, buy a feed management platform. DataFeedWatch calls itself exactly that, and says it connects to more than 2,000 channels and marketplaces.

And on a small catalogue, do it yourself. A few dozen products, an afternoon, and titles written by somebody who knows the products will beat anything automated. Software earns its keep when there are more SKUs than you can hold in your head.