You may be aware that Google has recently published its revised feed policy which applies from 15 September 2015
These can be read in more detail here
To save you reading it all, there are three changes that will affect you as a merchant in almost all cases.
1. Changes in Google (Category) Taxonomy
Google is changing their category structure. Some existing categories are being withdrawn, some are new, most are unchanged. Merchants using old redundant categories will need to update them in line with the new policy. If you are an existing Feed Manager customer we will be doing this in August. We will inform you if you need to do anything at your end as a consequence of this work (although that is likely to be limited).
2. Designated Brands
Google has now introduced the concept of designated brands . If your product inventory includes any of these brands (of which there are c 50) within the product submission, they must now include the bar code (EAN) as a mandatory GTIN value, or products will be non-compliant and be disapproved. This is similar to the current policies covering media and software products.
if a product submission does not have bar codes for designated brand products, these will be disapproved. For Feed Manager clients, all products that fail this new policy will be identified and flagged to you for discussion/resolution from the end of July.
3. Colour definitions
In May 2013 Google changed its policy on valid colour names. The format of the colour name was defined more precisely and “multi” or “multi-coloured” is not allowed as a term. Multi-coloured products must identify the dominant colour followed by no more than two others, expressed in this way as an example: red/yellow/blue. Any other combinations of colours where the colours are separated by other symbols/spaces are not allowed.
While warnings/disapprovals for mal-formatted colour fields have yet to appear in any Merchant Centre diagnostics (to our knowledge), as we are upgrading Feed Manager for 1 & 2, we intend to permanently deal with any non compliant products in this area. Over the next few weeks we will identify all non-valid colour fields for further action. Most of these will be automatically dealt with by us but we will flag any that can’t be dealt with to you for help/resolution.
Anything that requires merchant assistance will be raised with you as early as possible because for some of you these changes will have a major impact.
If want to talk to us now please get in touch.
This is the first of several blogs on this topic. More to follow and it is recommended that you look out for future updates on this topic.
