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Price mismatch

A price mismatch is when the price in your product feed differs from the price on your own product page, which can get the product disapproved on Google.

Also known as
  • Mismatched product price

Product data engineer

What it means

Google checks your prices against your own website. Googlebot “routinely crawls your website landing pages” and compares the price in your data with the price on the page or in its structured data. Where they differ, Merchant Center raises Mismatched product price, and “the product with the mismatch may be disapproved”.1

The test is exact: “Prices reflected in the HTML need to match exactly the prices uploaded in Merchant Center.” Common causes on Google’s list include:1

  • Website and feed updates made at different times
  • Incorrect structured data on the page
  • A sale price with the wrong dates or time zone
  • A single-item price on a product sold in a minimum quantity

Google can also apply a pre-emptive item disapproval when price or availability differ between your data and your landing pages. It will “err on the side of caution”, and “A review is required to resolve these issues.”2

Think of it like this

Imagine a shelf-edge label that disagrees with the till. Whichever one is right, the shopper was shown a price they could not pay, and that is what Google checks for.

For example

A supplier’s price list is ex VAT, so the feed says 104.16 GBP for a cordless drill the product page sells at £124.99. Google’s specification asks for UK prices to include VAT, so the feed should say 124.99 GBP, the price the page shows.31

Why it matters

A disapproved product stops showing across Google, and Google warns that prices in your data that differ from your website “may lead to an account suspension”.21 A feed built from a trade price list, before VAT, would differ on every row.

Not to be confused with

A price mismatch differs from an invalid price. Google raises Invalid value for category [price] when the price is 0, whereas a mismatch is a valid price that disagrees with your landing page.4

Sources

  1. Google Merchant Center Help. How to fix: Mismatched product price.
  2. Google Merchant Center Help. Issues in Merchant Center.
  3. Google Merchant Center Help. Product data specification.
  4. Google Merchant Center Help. How to fix: Invalid value for category [price].

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