Why Google Merchant Center disapproves products — and how to fix the top reasons

Google matches your products to its catalogue using GTINs — the number behind a UPC, EAN, or ISBN barcode. For a branded product that has one, leaving the gtin empty, or sending a number that fails Google's checksum, triggers a disapproval or a silent demotion.

• Send the real GTIN for any product a manufacturer assigned one to.
• Set identifier_exists to false only for genuinely custom or handmade items.
• Never invent or pad a number — a wrong checksum is worse than none at all.

Google re-crawls your product page and compares it to your feed. If the feed says $39 but the page shows something else — after a discount, a currency rounding, or a tax setting — the item is disapproved for a mismatched price. The same happens when the feed says in stock and the page is sold out.

• Keep the feed price and currency exactly matching the storefront, including sale prices.
• Make sure availability reflects real inventory, not a cached value.
• Watch markets and currency conversion — a rounded converted price is a frequent silent mismatch.

Promotional overlays, watermarks, placeholder graphics, or a resolution that is too low all violate Google’s image policy. A product can sit approved for weeks, then get disapproved the moment you swap in a "Sale!" badge image.

• Use a clean product image with no text or promotional overlay.
• Meet the minimum resolution — at least 100×100px, and far larger is better.
• Avoid placeholder or "image coming soon" graphics.

Some disapprovals are about what you sell or claim, not data quality — restricted categories, unsupported health or weight-loss claims in a title, or missing attributes a product type requires. These need a content change, not a feed tweak.

• Remove unsupported claims from titles and descriptions.
• Add the attributes Google requires for your category — age group, gender, and size for apparel.
• Request a re-review only once the underlying issue is genuinely fixed.

None of this shows up on your storefront. You find out when Shopping traffic drops, or when you happen to open Merchant Center and scroll the diagnostics. The practical answer is monitoring: a regular scan that flags new disapprovals the day they happen, names the cause in plain language, and — where it is a data issue — corrects it in your store.