Google Shopping feed for Shopify

In Merchant Center the feed is a product data source: a file Google fetches from a URL every 24 hours by default, on a schedule you can change. The document is RSS 2.0 with Google's g: namespace (an attribute without the g: prefix is ignored) and every variant of every product is its own item. If you prefer Google's tab-separated format, the same template writes TSV instead.

Feedflock hosts the file on a stable URL and regenerates it every hour, so every fetch reads current prices and stock. Products not refreshed for 30 days expire from Merchant Center; a scheduled fetch of a live feed never lets that happen.

Every item needs g:id, g:title, g:description, g:link, g:image_link, g:price and g:availability, and branded goods need g:brand. g:condition is required only for used or refurbished goods; the template sends new by default. Availability takes only in_stock, out_of_stock, preorder and backorder, and unlike Heureka, Google wants sold-out products kept in the feed as out_of_stock: an offer deleted and added back takes a long time to return.

The price must match the product page in the target country's currency, VAT included everywhere except the US and Canada. Google never adds tax for you. With Shopify Markets the feed takes the market's prices and currency. Shipping cost is mandatory in about thirty countries, Czechia and Slovakia among them; Feedflock can send it per product from your Shopify rates, or you set it in Merchant Center. A price in the feed overrides the account settings for that product.

Variants of one product share a g:item_group_id, required for variants in Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US, and for free listings everywhere. Telling variants apart in the title is one of Google's minimum requirements, so the default title is the product name plus the variant name. Shopify's barcode field is free text; Google accepts 8, 12, 13 or 14 digits with a valid GS1 check digit, and an incorrect GTIN disapproves the product while a missing one only limits its reach. Google also asks you not to send internal SKUs as an MPN, so the template doesn't.

g:google_product_category takes one value from Google's taxonomy: the numeric ID, which Google recommends, or the full path in the feed's language. A value off the list is dropped with a warning. g:product_type carries your own categorisation. Feedflock keeps Google's tree in fourteen languages and maps products with a Shopify category through Shopify's official crosswalk, so rules are needed only for the rest.

Google fails a feed in three different ways, and it helps to know which is which. A price or availability that differs from the product page, or an incorrect GTIN, disapproves the product. A category that isn't in Google's taxonomy is dropped with a warning. A title over 150 characters is truncated. Images have to be at least 500 × 500 px, enforced from 31 January 2027; a new image behind an unchanged URL can take weeks to be noticed, which is why Shopify's CDN changes the URL when you replace a photo.

Merchant Center Diagnostics stays the final word on landing-page matches. Everything mechanical Feedflock catches first: every generation checks lengths, enum values, price format and GTIN length against Google's spec, and lists empty required attributes, so the first fetch Google sees is already clean.