Google Merchant Center Feed – Manufacturer Requiring Price to be Hidden
I’ve got a client running an ecommerce site. One of the brands they carry has updated its policy, stating we can no longer show prices in advertising or on the website effective in a few weeks. The price must only be shown to customers once they log in to the website.
I’m assuming this means we can no longer advertise these products through the shopping feed, as price is a required attribute, and I assume Google won’t accept “login to view price” as a valid attribute. Am I correct in this assumption?
I’ve never had a product that couldn’t have the price shown before, and e-commerce is not my area of expertise – I focus more on the search side of things.
Just curious if any of you e-commerce gurus know something I don’t know about advertising when the price isn’t allowed to be publicly posted. Any insight is appreciated. We’ll be covering this product with Google search ads and non-shopping placements, but losing the shopping feed will definitely hurt.
The short answer is:
You are correct in your assumption that Google Merchant Center requires a publicly available price that precisely matches your landing page, and “login to view price” is not an acceptable value for the ‘price’ attribute.
To maintain compliance and continue running Google Shopping ads for these products, you will need to utilize the Merchant API to exclude these specific products from your feed dynamically.
This is highly cost-effective because it automates a critical compliance task, preventing manual feed edits and avoiding the penalty of product disapprovals and potential account suspension, thus protecting your overall Google Ads performance.
The Merchant API allows for automated item-level updates or deletions, which can be triggered by your eCommerce system’s product data change, ensuring that only eligible products are submitted for Shopping Ads.
The long answer is:
Your client’s new manufacturer policy requiring a login to view the price creates a direct conflict with Google Merchant Center’s core data requirement for the ‘price’ attribute.
Google’s policy mandates that the price in your product feed must be the exact price that a user can immediately see on the landing page without taking any steps other than loading the page.
Requiring a login violates this fundamental policy, and submitting these products will inevitably lead to product disapprovals and, if persistent, an account-level suspension, which would halt all your Google Shopping activity.
The technical and most robust solution to this problem is an integration leveraging the Merchant API, which is part of the Google Ads ecosystem.
You will use the Merchant API’s products service to manage your product data programmatically.
Specifically, you can use the delete method to remove these specific, price-restricted products from your Merchant Center account.
The cost-effectiveness here is rooted in automation and risk mitigation.
Instead of manually trying to exclude thousands of products from your feed generation process – a time-consuming and error-prone task – your eCommerce platform or an intermediary service running on a platform like Google Cloud Platform (GCP) can be configured to call the Merchant API as soon as the price-hidden flag is activated for a product.
This API integration ensures real-time compliance, immediately removing non-compliant items and protecting your overall Merchant Center status, which is far more valuable than the cost of implementing the API integration.
While you focus on Google Search ads and non-shopping placements, this API approach ensures your remaining Shopping campaigns run without interruption or risk.
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