Notes
Google Merchant Center feed errors explained: the 12 rejections that block most products and how to fix each in the feed
Andrej Lauko, ARLing ยท 5 September 2026
Google Merchant Center and Meta Commerce Manager both work the same way underneath. A scheduled fetch pulls your feed file (XML, TXT or CSV) from a URL or an upload, a parser reads it row by row against a fixed attribute list, and any item that fails a required-attribute check or a format rule gets an item-level disapproval instead of blocking the whole upload. The rest of the feed still goes live, so a batch of bad rows can sit disapproved in Diagnostics for weeks without anyone opening that tab. The twelve causes below follow Google's product data specification and Meta's catalog fields reference, in the order they most often show up on a Shopify or WooCommerce export.
01
Missing or invalid id
`Missing value: id`
Google's spec says to "use a unique value for each product. Use the product's SKU where possible," capped at 50 characters. Meta requires the same content id, unique within the catalog, up to 100 characters, and it must differ from any item_group_id. A feed that reuses the parent product id for every size and colour does not raise an error, it just overwrites the earlier rows in Diagnostics.
Fix