Troubleshoot your feed

At times, you may need help troubleshooting your feeds. Our goal is to provide answers to specific problems that you might encounter when using feeds and Manufacturer Center. If your account has been disapproved and your feeds seem to be correct, please ensure you did not accidentally violate our policies. Below are some common problems and resolutions.

Review feed processing results

You’re able to review the results of all feed processing for file-based or Google Sheet-based feeds. To find the results:

1. Sign in to your Manufacturer Center account.
2. From the navigation panel, click Products, and then click Feeds.
3. Click the primary or supplemental feed name that you’d like to review.
4. Review the results:
   • Properties: Includes key feed properties, which vary depending on the input method of the feed. Here, you can find properties such as input method, timezone, filesize, detected delimiter (if applicable), and more.
   • Attributes: Depending on which Manufacturer Center program your feed is opted into, we require attributes to adhere to the product data specification. In this section, you can review all of the attributes we found in your feed, including those attributes which are recognized and map to the feed specification, and also unrecognized attributes which do not match any of those listed in the product data specification. You may review the list and use tools (such as feed rules) to tell Manufacturer Center which unrecognized attribute you would like to use to populate a Google attribute. For example, you may want to use the product name as a part of the value you submit for the title [title] attribute
   • Processing Data: In this section, you can review the amount of items found in your feed, as well as those with any detected item issues. Review the list of item issues to understand how many items in your feed are impacted, including examples and links to documentation to address the issue.

Note: Processing only checks for basic file and data issues. To see all issues, go to "Diagnostics".

Data file issues

• Your data file may be missing a required attribute; an often forgotten one is ID [id].
• Make sure to use one of our supported file formats.
• We currently don't allow feeds in .xls format. If you created a feed in .xls format, learn how to convert it to a .txt file.
• Ensure text files are in UTF-8 format if you use characters beyond the US ASCII standard.

Feed registration issues

• When using filename extensions like .zip or .gz, you must ensure that the file is compressed because our system assumes that the file is compressed. Uploading an uncompressed file in this case may cause feed failure. Make sure that the compressed archive contains exactly one file.
• When editing your data feed settings it's recommended that you leave "autodetect" as the selected option unless a specific problem needs to be addressed.

Formatting issues

• Tab-delimited text
  • If you are using previously formatted text (anything with line breaks or quotations), quoted attributes must be enabled. Note that this is the default setting for Manufacturer Center accounts. Learn how to use them and how to turn them on
  • Make sure that all your rows (items) contain the right number of tabs/columns (attributes); oftentimes there will be either an extra tab or a missing tab.
• XML
  • You need to escape the following characters:

    Character	Description	XML Escape character
    "	double quotation mark	"
    &	ampersand	&
    '	apostrophe (apostrophe-quote)	'
    <	less-than sign	&lt;
    >	greater-than sign	&gt;

  • Your attribute names may contain capital letters; any capitalization in your attribute names should be removed. For example, the title [title] attribute should be entered as <g:title>, instead of <g:Title>.
  • Incorrect encoding sometimes occurs. Be sure to encode your file in the accepted encodings.
  • In text files, ensure that you complete any pairs of quotation signs (" or '). For XML files, ensure that you escape them accordingly.

Uploading issues

• Your data file may be too large.
  • Please note that direct upload files must be less than 20 MB.
  • If you are encountering an "oops" message from this method please wait a few hours and try again.