Clarification about UPC, GTIN etc

Also sorry to add to this:

Some products only have a single GTIN for all variations (i.e. colours) – what do we do?

Some products have individual GTIN for each variation – if they are set up as variation products then what GTIN do we use for the parent or just leave blank?

Hi df9000,

Thanks for using our plugin and reaching out to us.

Unfortunately Google is pretty strict in usage of the GTIN field so you would really need to meet their requirements in order to get all of your products approved in Google’s Merchant Center.

1. There are really only a few product categories that do not require a GTIN or other unique identifier. Products need to have a “GTIN and brand” OR “MPN and brand”. When they do the plugin will automatically put the g:identifier_exists to ‘yes’. Otherwise the g:identifier_exists will be set to no. Google will disapprove your products when the g:identifier_exists is set to no, unless those products meet these requirements: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324478?hl=en

2. Every product needs one GTIN (do not put in multiple per product). This can either be a GTIN, EAN or UPC. Bear in mind though that you have to pick one of those field to use at all your products because you can only map Google’s g:gtin field to one of your woosea_ fields.

3. You probably have set a feed refresh interval in Google’s Merchant Center. You can also force a manual feed refresh in Google’s Merchant Center. Once refreshed it could take hours to even a few days before Google re-evaluated all of your products.

4. Unfortunately a GTIN really needs to be unique for every product. Also for variants that only differ per colour. I am not sure what would happen if you submit all variants with the same GTIN to Google’s Merchant Center but changes are that Google will disapprove them.

5. Parent products don’t make it to the product feed at all (Google is not allowing this) so you do not have to worry about the parent product GTIN.

Hope this helped?

All the best,
Eva

OK Eva thanks for info. With regards to this:

2. Every product needs one GTIN (do not put in multiple per product). This can either be a GTIN, EAN or UPC. Bear in mind though that you have to pick one of those field to use at all your products because you can only map Google’s g:gtin field to one of your woosea_ fields.

Does this mean that we should add the code to one column only irrelvant of what type of code it is? i.e. EAN,UPC, GTIN ?

If for one product you have an EAN fill it in in the EAN field, UPC goes in UPC en GTIN in GTIN but than do not forget to add all those fields in the field mapping page too.

Hope it is clear?

OK got it.

Something strange has happened – I went back to merchant centre and it seems that all of the listings were disaproved because they didnt have a GTIN number have now been approved! so I have most of my products live even though they don’t have GTIN or MPNs – how is this possible? seems to have happened since turning on Elite.

I am in the product of finding GTINs for products but its a laborious task – shall I bother continuing?

*I am in the process of finding GTINs

I would continue adding the GTIN’s, at some point Google will disapprove them again unless your products fall under the “products without a GTIN” section on this page: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/160161?hl=en

Best,
Eva

Assuming the issue at hand has been solved and our support is no longer required I am going to close the issue for housekeeping reasons.

Please feel free to reach out again whenever you have a question or need our support.

Have wonderful weekend,
Eva