We all know that creating a product feed for Google Shopping can be a real challenge and it usually takes some time to get everything right. You finally managed, created a Google Shopping product feed and uploaded it to Google’s Merchant Center only to find out that after a couple of hours Google starts disapproving the products you uploaded. The diagnostic graph in Google’s merchant center is slowly starting to turn red…horror! What happened?!

You start looking at the error notifications Google returns and quickly find that the main reason for the graph being red is “Temporary item disapprovals due to incorrect prices“.

Incorrect prices? Did I make a mistake creating the product feed? Did I put in wrong prices? You start blaming yourself, after-all, you never created a Google Shopping product feed before and so much can go wrong. Rest assured…it is probably not you who did anything wrong here but lets start by finding out what products Google exactly disapproved because of the ‘incorrect prices’.

So it seems Google found that product prices on your product pages are different than the ones you provided it the product feed. If this would actually be true than it would make sense for Google to disapprove the products as you would not want to advertise products on Google Shopping with wrong product prices. This would, most-likely, result in lower conversion rates and unhappy consumers.

Can Google be wrong?

Is Google right? Are the prices incorrect indeed? You pick some of the disapproved items and check them on your website. But…hey…Google is wrong! Prices displayed on your website match exactly with the prices put in your product feed. Why than does Google think the prices are incorrect? It took me some time to find out why Google disapproved all of these products. Initially I though that our plugin, WooCommerce Product Feed Pro, was to blaim. After-all, developing such a complex plugin does not go without making mistakes every now and than :). But it was not the plugin who was to blaim, it is a bug in WooCommerce that caused Google to, eventually, disapprove all variable products! This WooCommerce bug is still present in the current 3.3.3 release of WooCommerce and it causes the structured data markup (what is structured data markup) for all variable products to show the price of the cheapest variable version of a products. All variable products, apart from the cheapest one, therefor have a structured data markup price that is different than the price that is being put in the product feed and as a result Google will disapprove all of those variations.

What a pity, not being able to advertise on most of your variable products in Google Shopping! The WooCommerce bug is known with the developers of WooCommerce but it seems it will not be on the radar for a while to get fixed. Thats why we have decided to add a feature to our WooCommerce Product Feed PRO plugin that fixes this bug for you. All you have to do is enable the ‘Fix WooCommerce (JSON-LD) structured data bug’ option in the plugin settings section of our plugin:

Enabling this option will result in the structured data markup bug being fixed on all your product variations pages so Google will find that prices match those being put in the product feed. You will slowly see the number of disapproved items, due to incorrect prices, drop and extra clicks come in from your Google Adwords Shopping campaign.

Showing prices excluding taxes on your website?

When you are showing product prices excluding tax on your website you need to make sure to also tell our plugin not to use taxes on the structured data prices for your products. You can do so by enabling this option (since release 4.6.7):