Problem with "you need to add a GTIN or MPN"

[ukseller44]

Hi everyone,

I have listed all of my products and will promote them with google ads. However they don't get approved by google. It says "you need to add a GTIN or MPN"

I have listed them as "Custom item" so it shouldn't ask for GTIN or MPN however it keeps asking it.

Do you know why this is happening? Any recommendations? 

Thanks in advance

[Moira]

My pleasure @charmplug, don't hesitate to reach back out if you require any further assistance as you continue to work on your store. 

All the best,

[jessica0318]

Why does such a problem occur?

[Moira]

Hey @jessica0318,

I understand how this can be frustrating! Google has to review the product and determine whether they've seen the product before, or if it's a product that they haven't seen yet. This can take time and sometimes will require you to provide additional information. Are you having trouble with a particular product?  

[Ronald321]

I had this issue as we manufacture items that do not have a UPC code or anything, just our MPN. To fix this we marked the product as a custom product in the "edit Google fields" on the product page, and added our MPN. Also, in Google Merchant Center we added a feed rule to our Content API where the MPN would be entered for each product variant based on its id. This was the only way we could figure to get variants to have different MPNs.

[sampymishra]

Hi @ukseller44 

Google needs GTIN and MPN to understand and serve your product better. I can see that you sell custom products, so it is unlikely to have GTIN. You can use our app to automatically send a null value as GTIN to the Google merchant center that will not cause an error in the feed. It will show a warning of missing GTIN, but that would not cause disapproval of feed.

You can check the Easy Google Shopping Feed app by AdNAbu, which manages your merchant center feed and other advanced features such as Multilanguage, Multicurrency, and Metafields. 

You can also get in touch with our experts and request a demo. 

Hope this helps.

[donnamac]

@Ronald321 

Did you populate the MPN only if it's a Custom Product or do you always populate the MPN with the id? 

We are getting gtin errors on 'custom products' when it supposedly bypasses the gtin check.  But it is not consistent. 

I am hoping that if we put in this code, it will not get these errors.

Could you please let me know how the rule is set up? 

Is it just setting the MPN equal to the ID?

We have so many google feed errors that have valid gtin's but getting these errors.  It is keeping these products from our ads and is really hurting us.

Thx in advance!  

[Ronald321]

In order for our products to work we had to mark all as a custom product since we don't have a GTIN. We had to add the feed rule in Google Merchant Center for only those products which had variants.

Here is a picture of how product variant looked like in the feed.  The ID is the shopify product variant ID and the set to is what the MPN is.

Hopefully this will help you out a little bit.

[JHP_photo]

Hi @Moira ,

That's very useful information, thank you. I still have some tweaking to do to get everything properly accepted by Google and the Shopify Google App.

I have a question though. Google Shopping shows my product photo's weirdly cropped. In Shopify I add product photo's mostly without padding. So when a photo has a 3x4 ratio, I upload it without squaring it out.
Is there a way to make sure Google doesn't crop everything to a weird size? (photo)