Problem with not being able to send products to Google Merchant Center
Hello,
I have a PrestaShop based e-commerce site. A few months ago, I created a Google merchant account and started sending my products to Google via “product feed”. However, I noticed that the products could not be sent for a while.
A warning message as follows appears in the “Product Feed” section under the Prestashop –> Marketing –> Google –> Configure menu;
“You can’t send your products data to Google right now. Try again later.”
There is a “Refresh Page” button under this warning. Even though I pressed this button at different times, there was no change.
I wonder what is the reason for this problem? Can you help me?
My e-commerce site: www.morcuval.com
Best regards.
The short answer is:
The error message “You can’t send your products data to Google right now. Try again later.” is a generic message from the PrestaShop module indicating a connection timeout or a feed processing failure with the Google Merchant Center (GMC) API.
The problem is almost certainly not on Google’s side, but rather a malfunction or a conflict within the PrestaShop Google module itself, which may be struggling to authenticate, generate the feed URL, or handle a large number of products.
The best immediate step is to clear the module’s cache or reinstall the module.
For a reliable, long-term fix, you should abandon the module entirely and move to an API-based feed management system that directly connects your product database to GMC.
The long answer is:
That is an incredibly frustrating error because it gives you no useful diagnostic information.
Since you’re using a third-party module to interface with GMC, the problem lies in one of three areas: a faulty module cache, a server-side timeout while the module tries to build the feed, or an API key/authentication expiry that the module isn’t handling gracefully.
Reinstalling the module or clearing its specific cache is a crucial first step.
If the problem persists, it confirms the unreliability of this specific PrestaShop extension.
Many merchants find that reliance on e-commerce platform-specific modules for critical functions like product feeds introduces single points of failure.
The superior and future-proof solution is to use a server-side integration via the Content API for Shopping, which will give you direct, programmatic control over your product data feed.
The architecture, while it sounds complex, is an excellent and cheap long-term solution because it eliminates the buggy PrestaShop module as a middle-man.
For PrestaShop, you would typically use a custom script or a dedicated, professional feed management service that is built on the same principles, as PrestaShop is a bit less open with its product API compared to platforms like BigCommerce or Shopify.
However, the conceptual architecture remains the same and relies on three components:
Instead of relying on the broken module, a custom PrestaShop module or script would be used to securely export your product catalog data (titles, prices, descriptions, links, image URLs, etc.) into a structured format, like a database table or a simple API endpoint, which is essentially your product feed source.
This is Google’s service for programmatically managing product data, giving you the ability to insert, update, or delete products directly in your Google Merchant Center.
It is far more robust than relying on a static file feed URL.
The key to making this reliable and cheap is to use a dedicated, minimal server environment, like a Google Tag Manager (GTM) Server Container hosted on a service like Stape or a small Google Cloud Platform (GCP) instance.
This server acts as the secure intermediary.
It is programmed to retrieve the product data from your PrestaShop export, format it to meet all of Google’s feed specifications, and then use the Content API for Shopping to push a direct, guaranteed update to your Merchant Center.
This ensures that your product data is sent reliably, updates quickly, and is not susceptible to the arbitrary cache errors or timeouts of the front-end PrestaShop module.
For tracking conversions later, you would use this same server to capture the Google Click Identifier (gclid) from the user and send a purchase event as an Offline Conversion via the Google Ads API, creating an end-to-end, highly accurate tracking system.
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