Google Shopping feed check for Shopify stores

A Shopify store on the Google & YouTube app has no feed file: the app pushes your products to Merchant Center by API. This check reads the same product data straight from your store address, so there’s nothing to export and nothing to sign up for.

What does it check?

The same things I check when a store asks why its Shopping ads aren’t earning their keep, grouped by what Google does about them.

• Will get products disapproved or limited: promotional text in a title, a title over 150 characters, no barcode on the sampled products, a price of 0.00, and products that are sold out but still published.
• Costs clicks: the brand missing from the title or doubled up at the start, the store name in the title, thin titles, blank vendors and product types, colours, materials and sizes that are in your data but not the title, identical titles on different products, and empty, thin or copied descriptions.
• Worth tidying: no SKUs, no weights on products you ship, products with one image or none, and inconsistent capitalisation.

Each one comes with what the problem is, what Google does about it, and how to fix it in Shopify. Anything that needs a developer is written as what to ask them for.

Which title does Google actually see?

The Google & YouTube app gives you two choices for what it sends Google: your product title, or the search engine title from the product’s search engine listing. On most stores that second field has never been filled in, and Shopify falls back to the product title when it’s blank. Either way there’s no separate feed title, so the title written for someone browsing your site is usually the one Google matches searches against, and that’s what this check reads. Most of what it flags under “costs clicks” comes down to that one fact.

What can’t it see?

It reads product data, not your Merchant Center account. So it can’t see actual disapprovals, your Google product category, condition, gender and age group, custom labels, whether you’ve told Google a product has no barcode, free listings, or whether a supplemental feed already overrides your titles. It also only sees products published to your online store: a product that’s on the Google channel but hidden from the online store is invisible to it, and the reverse.

Those are what FeedForge sees with access, and fixes. This check is the free first look; FeedForge is the thing that rewrites the titles from your own Google data and measures whether each change worked.

How does it work?

• Reads up to 1,000 products from your store’s public product list, four pages of 250.
• Scores every product against the checks above, in your browser.
• Samples 60 products spread across the catalogue for the barcode check, because the barcode only appears on the per-product data, paced so your store doesn’t notice.
• Sets aside the add-on menus that options apps publish as products, and tells you how many it found.

Common questions

Is it only for Shopify?

Yes, for now. It reads Shopify’s public product data, which is the point: no feed file to export. If you’re on another platform and would use a feed-file version, tell me.

Will it slow my store down?

No. It makes at most 65 requests, one or two seconds apart, to pages Shopify serves from its own cache. A single shopper browsing your site does more.

Is a login required?

No. It only reads what any visitor can already see.

What if my store is password-protected?

Then there’s nothing public to read, and the check says so rather than giving you a zero. Run it once the store is open.

Why does it say my brand is missing from every title?

Because on a single-brand store your own name is the vendor, and it usually isn’t in the product titles. That looks odd on the page but it’s exactly what Google wants in the feed: brand first. If you’d rather keep your page titles clean, that’s what a separate feed title is for, and it’s the first thing FeedForge sorts out.

What happens to my data?

I keep the store address, the date, what the check found and the country it ran from, nothing about you. If you ask for the report by email, your address is used to send that one email and isn’t stored. The detail is on the privacy page.