Has anyone else recently started getting a message saying that the Gtin is missing, when it isn’t? I spotted this yesterday.
All of my products have valid barcodes in Shopify Admin, however they are not being sent across to GMC, except a few. I have logged this with Shopify Support, but curious if this is impacting anyone else?
Yes I am having a similar issue.
For me it appears that any time a product sells, Shopify is sending incomplete data to Google Merchant Centre which is stripping out the GTIN, SKU and brand.
To fix it, I am having to manually edit each product when they sell. Editing the product in the Shopify admin appears to trigger a correct update to be send to GMC. Then a few hours later Google picks up the update and it’s removed the item from the warnings.
By “fix” I mean “get around the error until the product sells again”. Have emailed Shopify support as well to see if they can investigate and confirm that is what is happening.
All the values (GTIN, SKU, brand) are entered for all of our products, and were all valid in GMC.
This started yesterday so I presume Shopify have introduced a bug or GMC have edited the fields they need when an update is sent through the feed.
I have just spoken with Shopify Support again and apparently..
"Products are being flagged because Google is finding that they have a recognised GTIN available for those brands so that will have to be added for each product. This can show as a few different errors in the Google Channel which is why there is a “Limited Performance” warning in the Merchant Center account to alert merchants to the fact that a product has a recognised GTIN. "
The way to fix it according to them is to go into your Admin, go to Google sales channel and make sure that all of the products have the ‘Custom’ field set to ‘False’
I have had my store since January and this has never been a requirement previously. I happened to install Ablestar yesterday and these problems have started, it makes me a bit suspicious.
Pretty sure Shopify Support is wrong on this one.
This is the order of events I am seeing:
Product is correct in Google Merchant Centre - all fields visible including barcode, MPN and brand.
Product sells on Shopify website.
Product now shows without barcode, MPN and brand in GMC.
A warning appears in GMC about the missing values. The values ARE missing in GMC as they appear to have been stripped out after the product sold on the website. The values ARE present in Shopify admin,
Edit product in Shopify to change any value.
New update triggered and sent to GMC.
Barcode, MPN and brand appear again in GMC. Warning is removed.
This started yesterday, 30th Nov 2021.
It is quite possible we’re having different issues, however for me, changing the Custom field to False has pulled all of my Gtins back into GMC.
I’m having all of these same issues! All my products have valid GTIN’s and UPC’s.
I have 23,000 products and now they are all saying I do not have a valid GTIN. Google isn’t showing it coming through anymore so all my shopping ads and listings are losing me all my sales now.
Hello,
This is still happening to me as well. The work around I was using:
View the product in Shopify admin
More actions → Google fields
Enter the MPN value
Save
NOTE: Do NOT tick “This is a custom product”
I would recommend you try this on a small selection of products to verify it works for you @musicfan88
This sets the value “Custom product” to be false on the product. For some reason this then seems to “FIX” the problem. It’s not an actual fix in my opinion as clearly there is a feed issue with Shopify or Google Merchant Centre changed something. This started for us on 30th Nov 2021.
Shopify support also sent me the same “non fix” and haven’t acknowledge they are actually still investigating the bug. As @JBrown2 above was told by Shopify support:
“The way to fix it according to them is to go into your Admin, go to Google sales channel and make sure that all of the products have the ‘Custom’ field set to ‘False’”.
This does “work” and removes the warning in Google Merchant Centre.
This will affect anyone using Shopify to submit product feeds to Google Merchant Centre so is rather urgent.
Ok - so we can confirm that changing the product as “Customer = False” solves the issue?
IF that’s the case, then this is manageable. I have an app where I can mass update certain fields on products. It takes forever but at least it’s not a manual update. One of the fields I can update is custom product true/false for google feeds.
Can anyone else confirm that updating the custom product field is fixing the issue? Or am I misunderstanding what I’ve read here so far?
Yes setting custom product to false on the product should remove the warnings in Google Merchant Centre.
That has worked for me. If you have an automated process, maybe you could do a small amount just to verify for safety (I personally don’t like updating them all in one go).
It takes a few mins for it to show in Google Merchant Centre.
Hi,
As @RDHAdmin has said, this fixed my problem yesterday. All of my products are now showing in Google Shopping again and traffic is coming through to my site.
I can confirm that “custom product = false” does indeed bring back the GTIN.
By all means, anyone who is facing this issue should report the issue to Shopifys customer support to make them aware of the issue.
They are currently ignorant about it and is trying to blame the issue on anyone but themselves.
In reply to me they said it was being looked at but no actual confirmation it’s a bug on there end or the alternative that Google Merchant Centre changed their feed requirements.
One thing to note. When you add new products through the website interface, “Custom Product” is not set. So they will all immediately be in the warning/error state in GMC. I’m fixing those by adding MPN on “Google fields” which sets “Custom product” to false.
I can’t see another way so far to quickly set “Custom product” to false for a specific product.
Ablestar Product Editor app allows you to set the Custom Product field to False in bulk, rather than 1 by 1.
AbleStar Product Editor app allows you to set the Custom Product field go False in a bulk job rather than one by one.
We’ve been experiencing this too.
If it’s tied to the custom product flag, any chance this is getting triggered because the products have a Custom product type? The Standard vs Custom product type options are something that were introduced more recently, and Standard options look to map directly to Google Shopping product categories.
I’ll have to go back through the thread and see if any of the recommendations can fix this for us.
When I first contacted Shopify support I asked if this was causing the issue, to which they said it ‘could be’ therefore I should remove them.
I removed them and it didn’t help at all, so I wasted time adding them in the first place to then remove them unnecessarily.
My guess is they are treating products as custom products if the value of custom product has not been set, due to a code logic error.
Based on the Shopify interface, there are three possible values for “is custom product”:
Not set / null (which is the value when you add a product)
True
3, False
When you add a product via the Shopify interface, it’s “Not set”. This is even if you have GTIN, SKU etc added on the product. Previously, this would submit correctly to Google Merchant Centre.
On 30th Nov 2021, it looks to me like Shopify changed something so that if the value of custom product was “Not set”, they stopped including the GTIN and SKU in the Google Merchant Centre Feed. This could be down to some line of code assuming the value will be true or false. For example, IF customProduct == false, add barcode and sku, ELSE don’t add barcode and sku. This would then mean all “not set” products are treated as custom products (which is what happened - all products that previously were correct, now showed without barcode and sku in GMC).
Just guessing here based on what I’ve observed.
If you manually change a product from custom product = “not set/null” to custom product = “false”, then it fixes.
Shopify have still not replied acknowledging they are planning to fix this.
Note that ALL products added via the Shopify interface default to “note set/null” for custom product, and have an error/warning in Google Merchant Centre. As soon as you edit custom product and set it to FALSE, then the warning/error clears and the barcode and SKU appear in GMC.
How is everyone setting custom product = false, outside of using an app? For the products I’m running into the publishing errors on, when I look at the item within the Google channel settings the “Is custom product” is unchecked already. Checking and unchecking doesn’t allow me to save, but based on prior posts it sounds like these products likely have the custom product value = not set/null because they haven’t been changed since being loaded.
Are you uploading the custom product setting? Are you adding in the MPN and leaving custom product set to false? This seems like it should be an easy thing to solve and the system should allow you to do it in bulk, but unfortunately I am expecting that this won’t be the case without looking at an add-on.