Product Feed Checklist

Fix these in Shopify first

These four feed everything downstream. Worth ten minutes before you go further.

01 Barcode is filled on every variant This is where your GTIN comes from. Blank barcodes mean nothing can match your product to the same one on Amazon, so you're left out of the comparison entirely.
```
Products → Variants → Barcode
```
02 Vendor is filled on every product Vendor becomes the brand field. We see "N/A" and store names sitting in there constantly.
03 Titles read like the product name Brand, product, the attribute that matters. A title with six pipes in it reads as noise to anything trying to work out what the product is.
```
Ridgeline Merino Crew, Charcoal, Medium

not

Ridgeline Merino Crew | Sulfate Free | Vegan | Ethically Sourced | M
```
04 Descriptions describe Write what the thing is, not why someone should want it. An agent is looking for facts it can lift out, and persuasion gives it none.

Check what your feed already sends

Most of this is already right. Spot-check it and move on.

05 Price matches the site during a promo Price mismatches get products suppressed, and they only surface while a discount is live. Checking in a quiet week tells you nothing.
06 Availability matches real stock Google wants preorder. OpenAI's spec wants pre_order. Build for one, send to the other, and it fails here.
07 sale_price Don't just overwrite price when something goes on sale. You lose the strikethrough, which is most of why the discount works.
08 item_group_id Groups your variants. Without it, nine colors look like nine products. Shopify normally sets this from the product ID, but check it survived the export.
09 Product URLs resolve cleanly Pull ten straight from the feed export and open them. You're looking for redirects, 404s and anything still on HTTP.
10 Image URLs are stable Replacing an image in Shopify changes its URL. If anything cached the old one it breaks, and you won't see it in the admin.

Build the supplemental feed

Shopify has no field for any of these, so no app is going to add them for you. Most of your time goes here.

11 Make the sheet Product ID in column A, a column for each attribute you're adding, then link it in Merchant Center under Data sources. No developer, and your existing feed carries on untouched.
```
id      product_highlight            product_detail
8821    Machine washable, ...        Fit, Sleeve, Long
8822    Holds 40oz, ...              Material, Steel
```
12 product_highlight Two to ten bullets, 150 characters each. This is the field AI Overviews quote from, so if you only do one of these, do this one.
```
Commas between values, no quote marks.
Quote them and Merchant Center treats the lot as one bullet.
```
13 product_detail Specs, as section / attribute / value. Dimensions, material, what it works with. Things a buyer could verify rather than claims, and Google's spec asks you not to stuff keywords here.
14 question_and_answer Your support inbox has already written these. Whatever people email you before buying is what an agent needs when your description comes up short.
15 google_product_category Set it yourself, product by product. Auto-assignment regularly misfiles apparel, and the wrong category quietly drops the attributes that category needed.
16 Variant attributes color, size, size_type, size_system, material, pattern, age_group, gender. Shoppers filter on all of these, and a blank means you're excluded from that filter.
17 Nothing is duplicated across fields Google asks you not to repeat anything already in title, description, product_highlight or product_detail. Repeat it and you've spent a field on nothing.

Check your work

Worth doing the day after you upload, not the same afternoon.

18 Merchant Center diagnostics is clean Wait a day, then check the feed is being read and your attributes landed on the products you expected.
19 Ask ChatGPT to recommend a product like yours See whether you come up, and whether what it says about you is right. Do this before you start so you have something to compare against.
20 Re-check after your next catalog change Supplemental feeds are keyed on product IDs. Launch a new collection and those products simply aren't in it, so put a reminder in your calendar.

This pays off either way

Google Shopping and Performance Max read the same product data these agents do, so this usually turns up in Shopping performance long before anything changes in AI results. Worth doing even if you think the agent stuff is overblown.

Prefer to work in a spreadsheet? Here's the same checklist as a Google Sheet. File then Make a copy, and it's yours to mark up.

Fix these in Shopify first

Check what your feed already sends

Build the supplemental feed

Check your work

This pays off either way

What's your next profitable move?