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Description
Check any product feed you have open for missing GTINs, images, prices and other Merchant Center blockers. Runs locally. IronFeed Feed Checker reads the product feed open in your browser tab and tells you, in about a second, which items would be rejected by Google Merchant Center. It runs thirteen checks locally on your machine. Nothing is uploaded. If you work with product feeds, you already know the loop: upload the feed, wait for Merchant Center to process it, come back hours later, and find out that 2,400 items were disapproved for a missing attribute you could have caught before you started. This extension closes that loop. Open the feed, click the icon, read the numbers. HOW IT WORKS 1. Open a product feed in a tab — an XML, CSV or TSV URL, the same one you would hand to Merchant Center. 2. Click the IronFeed icon in your toolbar. 3. Read the report: feed format, how many items were parsed, how many have at least one problem, and a ranked list of which problems affect the most items. There is no account, no API key and no setup. Install it and it works on the next feed you open. WHAT IT CHECKS Thirteen checks, ordered by how many items each one affects, so the biggest problem is always the first line you read. Blocking issues — items with these are likely to be disapproved: • Missing id — Merchant Center needs a unique, stable identifier per item. Items without one cannot be matched between uploads, which breaks reporting and price history. • Missing title — no title, no ad. This is the single field that most influences whether your item shows for a query. • Missing link — the landing page URL. Items without it have nowhere to send a click. • Missing image_link — Shopping ads are image-first. An item without an image is not eligible. • Missing price — required for every offer, and it must carry a currency. • No GTIN and no MPN — Google needs at least one product identifier to match your item against its catalog. Items with neither lose visibility in comparison surfaces and are frequently disapproved outright. • Duplicate ids — two items sharing an id means one silently overwrites the other. This is the error people find last, because the feed uploads without complaint and the item count just looks wrong. Quality issues — these usually will not block an item, but they cost you impressions: • Price without a currency code — a bare number like "29.99" with no ISO 4217 code or symbol. Common when a feed is exported from a spreadsheet. • Missing availability — in stock, out of stock, preorder or backorder. Without it, Google has to guess, and guessing wrong wastes spend on unbuyable products. • Missing brand — required for most categories and used heavily for matching and filtering. • Missing description — the description feeds relevance matching. Google recommends a substantial one; empty descriptions leave matching signal on the table. • Title over 150 characters — the hard limit is 150. Longer titles are truncated or rejected, and the important words are usually at the end where they get cut. • Insecure image URL — an image_link still on http instead of https. Modern Merchant Center handling of insecure image URLs is inconsistent at best, and it is a five-minute fix. SUPPORTED FORMATS • Google Shopping XML — RSS 2.0 and Atom, with the g: namespace. The standard format Merchant Center consumes. • Generic product XML — any XML using item, entry or product as the repeating element. • CSV — comma-delimited with a header row, quoted fields handled correctly. • TSV — tab-delimited with a header row. The parser recognises common column-name variants, so it reads sku as id, image or image_url as image_link, ean, upc and barcode as gtin, and so on. Feeds exported from Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce and most feed tools are read without configuration. Large feeds are sampled at the first 5,000 items so the popup stays instant. When that happens the report says so explicitly, and tells you the true total. PRIVACY Everything runs in your browser. The extension does not collect data, does not store data, and does not talk to any server on its own. It requests exactly two permissions: • activeTab — read the tab you are looking at, only in the moment you click the icon. • scripting — run the parser inside that tab so the feed can be read from its own origin. There are no host permissions, which means the extension has no standing access to any site. It cannot run in the background, cannot watch other tabs, and has nothing to send anywhere. Feed URLs are often internal or contain access tokens, and this design means yours never leaves your machine unless you deliberately click through to the full audit.