There are two Merchant Center experiences. In the first, you upload a feed, everything turns green, and products start appearing. In the second, which is far more common, you upload a feed and get a dashboard full of red warnings written in a language that is technically English but not obviously helpful: "Missing value [gtin]", "Mismatched value (page crawl): price", "Invalid value [image_link]".
This is the guide for the second experience, plus the setup that prevents most of it. Part one is the setup done properly. Part two is every disapproval that commonly blocks UK sellers, what it actually means, and how to fix it. Requirements checked against Google’s Merchant Center documentation on 20 August 2026.
Full disclosure: we build Orbit, a UK ecommerce platform with a free Google Shopping feed plugin. Most of this post is platform-agnostic and the fixes are written for whatever you’re running. If you want the strategic version first, start with how to sell on Google Shopping in the UK.
Part one: setting it up so it works first time
Claim and verify your website
Google needs proof you own the domain your product links point at. Four routes: an HTML meta tag in your site’s head, an HTML file uploaded to your server, a DNS TXT record with your domain registrar, or a Google Analytics or Tag Manager container already installed on the site. If you have Analytics running, use it, it takes about a minute.
One thing to get right at the start: verify the domain your product URLs actually use, including the www or non-www form and the https prefix. If your feed links point at a hostname you haven’t claimed, every product fails on the link attribute regardless of how good the rest of your data is.
Complete business verification, because free listings depend on it
This is the step that silently sinks accounts. Unverified accounts do not appear in free listings. You can have a perfect feed, all products approved, and see nothing at all, purely because verification was never finished.
For a UK limited company, have your Companies House registration number and registered address ready. Google may ask for supporting documentation. The critical detail is consistency: the business name and address on your website, in Merchant Center, and on your Companies House record should agree. Sole traders can verify too, and the same consistency rule applies to your trading name and address. If your website has no address on it at all, add one before you start, because that alone stalls plenty of verifications.
Publish a returns policy and set up delivery
Google publishes three requirements for free listings and two are not about product data. Your website needs a returns policy Google can find and read, so it can show returns information alongside your products, and your delivery costs have to be calculable, either configured in Merchant Center or sent per product using the shipping attribute.
Both are mandatory for UK sellers, not optional extras. Set delivery up once inside Merchant Center: create your services, add flat or weight-based rates, and make them match what you actually charge at checkout. A delivery rate that disagrees with your checkout is just another mismatch waiting to be flagged. For the legal side of returns, see what UK returns law actually requires, and for choosing rates that don’t eat your margin, Royal Mail or a courier.
Submit the feed in a way that can’t go stale
Manual spreadsheet uploads are the root cause of the single most common disapproval in the entire system. Your shop changes prices and stock continuously; an uploaded file is a photograph of one moment. Use scheduled fetch, where you publish a feed at a URL and Google collects it daily, or twice daily during a sale period. Everything in part two gets rarer the moment your feed regenerates itself.
Part two: the errors, and what to actually do
Grouped by cause, roughly in order of how often they hit UK sellers. Before working through them one at a time, open the Diagnostics tab in Merchant Center and sort by affected product count. Fixing the one cause at the top usually clears more products than the next five put together.
Mismatch errors: your feed disagrees with your page
"Mismatched value (page crawl): price" is the most common data disapproval there is. Google crawled your product page, found a different price from the one in your feed, and stopped trusting the feed. Causes, in order: a stale manual upload, a sale that started on the site but not in the feed, or a feed submitting ex-VAT prices while the page shows VAT-inclusive ones. That last one is specifically a UK and EU problem, because Google’s specification excludes tax from the price attribute for the US and Canada only and requires it included everywhere else.
The fix is structural rather than per-product: make the feed read live prices and get fetched at least daily. For sales, use the sale_price and sale_price_effective_date attributes rather than editing the price field, so the promotion starts and ends on schedule without a manual step.
"Mismatched value (page crawl): availability" is the same problem wearing a different hat. Your page says out of stock, the feed says in stock, or the other way round. Same fix. Also check that your product page doesn’t hide its stock state behind JavaScript that Google’s crawler doesn’t execute.
Identifier errors: barcodes and brands
"Missing value [gtin]" means Google expected a barcode and didn’t get one. Strictly, GTINs aren’t universally required, but free-listing visibility drops sharply without them, so treat this as a real problem rather than a cosmetic one. If a manufacturer assigned the product a barcode, put it in your product record and let the feed carry it. If your products genuinely have no manufacturer barcode, because you make them, supply brand and MPN instead.
"Invalid value [gtin]" and "GTIN not correct length" mean the number you sent isn’t a valid barcode. Real GTINs are 8, 12, 13 or 14 digits, and they carry a check digit, so a typo produces an invalid value rather than a wrong-but-accepted one. Common causes: an internal SKU sitting in the barcode field, a number with spaces or hyphens, or a leading zero eaten by a spreadsheet. That last one is worth repeating, because it is extremely common: open a CSV in Excel and 0123456789012 silently becomes 123456789012.
"Incorrect identifier [gtin]" is the serious one. The barcode you sent is valid, but it belongs to a different product in Google’s catalogue. This happens when sellers copy a barcode from a similar item or guess one. Google’s own guidance is to only provide a GTIN if you are sure it is correct. Remove it and use brand plus MPN rather than leaving a wrong one in place.
"Missing value [brand]" catches makers who never thought of themselves as a brand. Brand is required for all new products except movies, books and musical recordings. If you make it, your own business name is the brand. Set a default brand at the feed level so new products inherit it automatically.
Missing required attributes
Every product needs id, title, description, link, image_link, price and availability. Beyond those, the conditional ones catch people: availability_date if you use preorder or backorder, condition if the item is used or refurbished, and for clothing and accessories, colour, size, age group and gender. Fashion brands hit that last set exactly once, usually the week they launch.
Title and description have limits worth knowing: 150 characters for title, 5,000 for description, 50 for id. Titles also need to match the landing page and stay free of promotional text. "SALE!! Free UK delivery!!" in a title is a rejection, not a clever tactic.
Image errors
"Invalid value [image_link]" or an unreachable image usually means the URL 404s, redirects somewhere unexpected, sits behind a login, or is blocked by robots.txt. Check the raw image URL in a private browser window; if you can’t load it there, neither can Google.
Promotional overlays and watermarks get products rejected. No text, no borders, no "50% off" starbursts, no logos pasted into the corner. Google wants the product on a plain background, and lifestyle shots go in additional_image_link.
Image too small is about to become a much bigger issue than it is today. Google has set a minimum of 500 by 500 pixels effective 31 January 2027. If your catalogue is built on older 250 pixel thumbnails, that is a deadline with teeth, and re-exporting several hundred product images is not a January job. Audit now. Our £30 home photography setup covers re-shooting if it comes to that.
Landing page errors
"Unavailable desktop landing page" or its mobile twin means Google couldn’t load your product page. Usual causes: the product was deleted or unpublished while still in the feed, the URL redirects to a category page or the homepage, the page is geo-blocked or country-restricted, or your server was slow enough to time out during the crawl.
The redirect case deserves a note. Redirecting a discontinued product to your homepage looks tidy and Google treats it as a broken landing page. Either remove the product from the feed or send it to a genuine replacement.
Account-level problems
These are different in kind. A product disapproval affects one item; an account suspension takes everything down at once. The usual triggers are misrepresentation, which broadly means Google can’t verify you are who you say you are, and policy violations around restricted products.
Misrepresentation suspensions are frequently fixed by boring housekeeping: a clear contact page with a real address and phone number, visible returns and delivery policies, accurate business details matching Companies House, working checkout, and no fake urgency timers or invented reviews. If you’re suspended, fix the substance before you request a review, because a re-review on an unchanged site burns one of a limited number of chances.
The re-review timeline
For data errors, there’s no button to press. Fix the underlying data, wait for the next feed fetch, and Google re-reviews automatically. Straightforward data corrections typically clear within a few days. Policy disapprovals and account suspensions go into a manual review queue and take longer, sometimes considerably. Plan your promotions around that rather than discovering it the week before Black Friday.
How to stop them coming back
Nearly every recurring error on this page is a systems problem wearing the costume of a data problem. Three habits fix most of it:
- Generate, don’t upload. A feed built from live product data can’t drift out of sync with your shop, which removes the entire mismatch category.
- Validate before Google does. Check required attributes and identifier formats at the point your feed is generated, so bad data never reaches Merchant Center. A product missing a price or a barcode is far cheaper to catch in your own catalogue than after Google has rejected it.
- Fix at the source, not in the feed. If a product has no brand, add the brand to the product, not to a spreadsheet you’ll have to remember to edit again next month.
How this works on Orbit
Stating the bias again: on most platforms the tooling that prevents these errors is a paid add-on, commonly £30 to £40 a month. On Orbit the Google Shopping feed plugin is free on every plan, starting at £25 a month for Solo (£19 billed yearly), with a 14-day trial and no card required.
Concretely, on the errors above: availability is derived from your live stock count rather than a snapshot, so availability mismatches don’t arise. Prices come from the live product record in your store currency. Barcodes are checked against valid GTIN lengths before being sent, so an internal SKU sitting in a barcode field is left out rather than submitted as an invalid identifier, and your SKU goes into MPN as a fallback. You can set a default brand so new products inherit one. The feed regenerates when products change and is served at a URL you hand to Merchant Center as a scheduled fetch.
What it does not do, so you’re not surprised: every product goes out as condition "new", so used and refurbished stock needs handling separately. Google product categories come from a mapping screen you fill in, and products you haven’t mapped go out without a category. Delivery rates are still configured in Merchant Center, since the feed carries shipping weight rather than rates. And nothing on any platform can fix a missing barcode that doesn’t exist, or an image that’s 200 pixels wide.
Questions people ask us about Merchant Center
How do I fix a price mismatch in Google Merchant Center?
Make the feed read live prices and set it to fetch at least daily, twice daily during promotions. Price mismatch is almost always latency: a manually uploaded file goes stale the moment you change a price on the site. Two UK-specific causes are worth checking as well. Submit VAT-inclusive prices, because Google excludes tax from the price attribute for the US and Canada only, and use the sale_price attribute with sale_price_effective_date for promotions rather than editing the price field.
How long does it take for Google to re-review disapproved products?
Data errors are re-reviewed automatically on the next feed fetch and straightforward fixes typically clear within a few days. There is no button to speed this up, so a daily fetch schedule is your fastest route. Policy disapprovals and account-level suspensions go to a manual review queue and take longer, sometimes considerably, which is a good reason not to leave feed housekeeping until the week before a sale.
Why does Merchant Center say my GTIN is invalid?
Because the number is not a structurally valid barcode. Real GTINs are 8, 12, 13 or 14 digits with a check digit. The usual causes are an internal SKU sitting in the barcode field, spaces or hyphens in the value, or a leading zero stripped by a spreadsheet, which happens whenever a CSV is opened in Excel. If the product genuinely has no manufacturer barcode, remove the GTIN entirely and supply brand and MPN instead rather than sending something invented.
Can I use Google Merchant Center without a Google Ads account?
Yes. Merchant Center is free and free product listings do not require Google Ads. You need an approved feed, a verified business, a returns policy published on your website, and delivery settings configured. A Google Ads account is only needed if you want paid Shopping ads on top. Plenty of small UK shops run free listings alone.
Why is my Merchant Center account suspended for misrepresentation?
Misrepresentation broadly means Google cannot satisfy itself that you are who you claim to be. The fixes are usually unglamorous: a contact page with a real address and phone number, visible returns and delivery policies, business details that match your Companies House record, a checkout that completes, and no fake countdown timers or invented reviews. Fix the substance before requesting a review, because re-reviewing an unchanged site uses up a limited number of appeals.
The short version
Finish business verification, because without it free listings never show no matter how clean your feed is. Publish a returns policy and configure delivery, because they are requirements. Generate your feed from live data and let Google fetch it daily, which removes the largest category of errors entirely. Send VAT-inclusive GBP prices. Only send barcodes you know are real. And put the 500 pixel image minimum in your calendar well before 31 January 2027.