I am having issues with the Merchant Center and the feed coming from Shopify. Our website uses the generic Google API feed within Shopify and sends our info over to Google. We have about 8000 products listed in the feed as far as I’m aware, recently we have been getting lots of 404 errors for products we no longer stock.
I have drafted/archived the products inside Shopify and unchecked the sales channel box for Google/Youtube for each product.
Google is reporting these products as unavailable pages, we want them hidden from Google and customers as the products are no longer available. How do I go about deleting them the Merchant Center?
I’ve searched various threads about this topic, and a few have suggested just removing the products manually from the API. Now I’m either being blind, or this thing is very well hidden as I have no idea where to locate it, or remove the products we no longer sell from it.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I can provide more info/screenshots if required.
Just to add, after a clear out of products we are down to roughly 6000 SKUs in the feed. It’s also showing update required, but I can’t see where this needs to be updated.
This is a common problem with the google and youtube app. The only way to fix this is to uninstall and re-install the app. However, be very very careful as you will have a big issue where all product id’s change. Because now Google uses the merchant api, no longer the content api.
Before you do anything, please view the below two videos.
Many thanks for your help. Both videos gave me all the information required to make the swap over.
We have swapped over to the new Merchant API. The products have been imported over from the feed, most have already been marked as approved.
It’s a shame we have to rebuild the views and traffic to the items, but at least it gives us a clean start and hopefully removes all the products we no longer sell from the feed.
So after all 6000 products were were approved yesterday, I came in to this message this morning. All 6000 products have this warning. Do I just need to wait for it to fix itself, or do I need to wipe it clean and start again?
I think I’ve now resolved this once again. Because Shopify’s settings were reset after updating to the Merchant feed, it turned on “Local Feed Partnership” duplicating every product adding an additional feed.
So the feed has been up and running for nearly 2 weeks now. We are getting errors for products that we have taken out of stock, but they are being sent to Google and returning 404 cannot be found pages.
The products are drafted on Shopify, with the sales channel for Google & YouTube deselected. Am I missing something, has something changed with the new Merchant Feed?
