Merchant Center feed errors that actually cost you sales
Merchant Center will happily list hundreds of warnings. Most do not affect delivery. The expensive ones are the errors that remove a product from eligibility — or keep it eligible while showing the wrong price or availability.
1. Price and availability mismatch
If the feed says in stock and the landing page says sold out, Google can disapprove the item or stop showing it. The fix is not a one-off upload; it is a sync. Price and availability should come from the same source as the storefront, not from a spreadsheet someone updates on Fridays.
2. Missing or inconsistent GTINs
For branded products, a missing or wrong GTIN limits eligibility and matching. If you do not have GTINs, use the correct identifier_exists setting rather than inventing values.
3. Titles written for the feed, not the searcher
A title stuffed with internal codes performs worse than brand + product + key attribute + size. Keep the structure consistent across variants so the feed is comparable.
4. Landing page mismatches
The feed URL, the ad URL and the canonical product page should be the same page. Sending Shopping traffic to a variant URL that canonicalises elsewhere splits signals and confuses measurement.
5. Disapprovals nobody reads
Policy disapprovals are easy to ignore until a whole category disappears. Build a weekly check: disapprovals by reason, new items, items that dropped out. Treat it like a monitoring alert, not a monthly report.
A practical order of work
Fix the data source first (price and availability), then identifiers, then titles, then landing pages. Everything else is optimisation.