Should we mark used videogames as custom product without a GTIN/EAN for google merchant center?

[Liddell]

We are a small company that sells used retro games and consoles. We have about 2500 products in our shop and we use the google/youtube app from shopify to link our products with the google merchant center and run google ads.

Generally the setup runs well but we'd like to optimize some things. Something that's bothering us are the many many warnings about missing GTIN's on our synced products in the merchant center and the potentially reduced effectiveness that Google notes.

Since we are a very small company, it doesn't seem feasable to go through so many products and manually type in the GTIN/EAN. I don't know of any (semi-)automated way to do this. We think we would have to take every product out of our shelves, type the number in, put the product back, rinse and repeat.

So the question is: Would it be a bad idea to instead mark every product as a custom product that doesn't need a GTIN? There are some products like used N64 controllers where we wouldn't know the GTIN without the original package anyways. We just aren't sure if we could get "punished" for marking products as custom when in fact they technically have a GTIN/EAN.

[EcomGraduates]

While it's ideal to have GTINs for all products, marking items as custom avoids the manual entry hassle and can still keep your listings active. Google might flag it if overused, so use it mainly for products where GTINs are genuinely unavailable or hard to obtain

[Liddell]

Would I know, if Google tagged the overuse of custom products? Is this something they point you to via notifications/recommendations?

Also: Are there any methods to somehow scan (in our case) EAN codes and import it in shopify? Or is manual typing really the only way?

[EmmanuelFlossie]

Not submitting barcodes, if I remember correctly will no longer be a reason for suspension.

But your products may become disapproved, or limited by performance.

So in all cases, you will put yourself at a disadvantage by not adding barcodes.

However, if you don't know the barcode, then do not submit, brand, mpn and gtin and set identifier exists to no.

Here is a rule you can apply: