If you’re running an online store and your products aren’t showing up in Google Shopping results, or Merchant Center is flagging disapprovals, this is usually fixable within days — not a sign something is fundamentally broken with your store.
What usually causes it
- Missing or mismatched GTIN/product identifiers. For branded products, a correct barcode number needs to be supplied wherever one exists; for genuinely unique or custom products, the feed needs to explicitly say no identifier exists, rather than leaving the field blank.
- Image issues — unreachable images (blocked by login walls or CDN restrictions), images with promotional text or watermarks overlaid, or images below Google’s minimum size requirements.
- Price mismatch between what’s in your feed and what’s actually shown on your live product page at the moment Google checks it — almost always a sync problem between a stale exported feed and current site pricing.
- Missing shipping configuration inside Merchant Center itself, which is a separate setting from whatever shipping logic your site’s checkout runs on.
- Policy flags for unclear business information, or a checkout that doesn’t clearly show total price including fees before payment.
- Stale feed data from a manually uploaded CSV that isn’t kept in sync with real site changes, rather than a scheduled fetch or API-connected feed plugin.
How I approach fixing it
I start with the Diagnostics tab in Merchant Center and sort issues by number of affected products, not alphabetically — this usually reveals that one template-level problem is causing dozens of individual disapprovals that look unrelated at first glance. Fix that root cause first, then re-check the count before chasing individual product-level errors one by one.
Why this matters for a Nigerian store specifically
Many local ecommerce sites set up Merchant Center once during launch and never revisit it, which means feed errors accumulate silently over months as products change, prices update, or stock shifts — with no obvious symptom beyond gradually declining Shopping traffic that’s easy to miss if you’re not checking Diagnostics regularly.
What a healthy feed setup actually looks like
- An automated, scheduled fetch or API connection — not a manually re-uploaded CSV that someone has to remember to update.
- Product identifiers and pricing that stay in sync with your live site automatically.
- Shipping settings configured directly inside Merchant Center, matching what customers actually see at checkout.
- Regular Diagnostics checks, not a “set it and forget it” approach.
I walk through each specific error type and its fix in much more detail, including the exact steps for WooCommerce feed plugins, in my Merchant Center troubleshooting guide.
Want your feed looked at directly? Send me your Merchant Center Diagnostics screenshot on WhatsApp and I’ll tell you what’s actually wrong.
