‘Expiring items’ in Google Merchant Center is one of those warnings that can easily go unnoticed. Even though Google does alert merchants about it, many forget to take action, and then, within a matter of a few days, start to notice sudden impacts in their Shopping ads’ performance or overall account health.
Ultimately, what starts as a simple warning quickly snowballs into poor ad performance and lost revenue.
That’s why it is important that whenever Google alerts you about this issue in your GMC account, you act early and take the right steps to resolve it swiftly so that your campaigns are always up and running.
In this blog, we’ll cover the expiring items in GMC error thoroughly. We will understand where the issue stems from, what are some strategies to resolve it, and the tools that can help you resolve this error. This includes issues like feed expiration or a mismatched domain between your product feed and website.
Table of Contents
What is the ‘Expiring Items’ Error in Google Merchant Center?
‘Expiring items’ is a warning that Google shows when your products are about to expire because you haven’t refreshed your feed in the last 30 days. Google requires that merchants regularly update their entire feed by resubmitting it within 30 days. If they fail to do so, then all items automatically expire.
This expiration rule applies to all products that you upload to GMC with files, Google Sheets, or even APIs. However, if you add products directly to the Merchant Center (with GMC editor), they won’t expire.
Even though this 30-day expiration cycle is set in stone and cannot be altered, Google offers some control through an optional expiration date attribute. This attribute lets you define the exact date when a product should stop showing in live listings. But remember, when you use this attribute for an item, it will expire either on the date that you specify or 30 days after the last feed refresh, whichever comes first.
However, in any case, you cannot use this attribute to extend the item’s default 30-day expiration timeline. It can only be used if you have some specific use cases and want the item to expire before the standard 30-day period.
Why Does Google Show the ‘Expiring Items’ Warning?
Google shows these warnings for expiring items to emphasize the importance of inventory data freshness. Your physical inventory, website details, and product feed data should be accurate and in sync at all times. Once you get a warning for an item’s approaching expiration date, Google expects that you resubmit its data and indicate to its systems that your inventory isn’t outdated.
Otherwise, outdated inventory details can mislead your customers and also create poor shopping experiences.
To understand this better, let’s consider an example.
Your store says that Product A is ‘out of stock.’ But your Merchant Center feed data hasn’t been updated yet, and it still says that Product A is ‘in stock.’ Now, a customer might view your Shopping ad and click on it with the expectation of purchasing the product. However, upon landing on your website, they will realize that the product is unavailable. This can frustrate the customer, lower their trust in your store, and also affect the credibility of Google’s advertisements.
Thus, resubmitting your inventory data and keeping your product feed fresh becomes important.
Impact of Expiring Items
If you don’t address the ‘expiring items’ warning, the affected products will expire. After that, these items will no longer be eligible for Google Shopping ads, free product listings, or even local Inventory ads. As a result, you may even see a sudden drop in ad impressions, clicks, or all other important metrics.
What’s worse is that, once an item expires, it can take weeks or even months to regain its past performance, even if you re-add it later.
Additionally, if you ignore the ‘expiring items’ warning in GMC for too long, your GMC account might also get suspended.
How to Prevent Items From Expiring in GMC?
The solution to resolve the ‘Expiring items’ error is simple: you have to resubmit all the product data for the affected item(s).
To do that, we will discuss several different methods below.
Resubmit Your Product Data via the Original Product Upload Method
The first and universal way to deal with this GMC error is to resubmit your inventory on Google using the original method that you employed earlier for uploading items to the Merchant Center.
This means that if you previously used the content API for shopping to submit product data, you will have to submit the refreshed product data with it again. If you uploaded products with Google Sheets or any other file hosted online, you will have to use those files again.
Strictly avoid mixing product upload methods, as that can result in inconsistencies between your product data.
Some other important points to note:
- For some product upload methods, such as Google Sheets and adding products with a file, you can always use the ‘Update’ button in GMC to manually trigger a refresh of all products and their attributes for that particular source.
- Using scheduled fetches with a frequency set to ‘Daily’ or ‘Weekly’ for supported product upload methods can help you ensure your product data stays up to date automatically.
Refresh Expired Items by Editing Them in Shopify
| Note: 1. This method is applicable only to Shopify merchants who are using the Google and YouTube app to sync their Shopify products to Merchant Center. 2. To be able to use this method, you should have opted for ‘automatic sync’ when setting up the sales channel app. That is because with the ‘automatic sync’ setting turned on, whenever you update product information, it will automatically be synced to GMC. |
Simply go to the specific product in your Shopify admin that has been affected by the error. Then, make a minor change to that product’s title, description, or any other attribute. Once you do so, Shopify will recognize that as an update and push the refreshed data to GMC automatically.
Tada. Your products are now eligible for 30 more days.
However, remember that this method is most useful if you want to refresh the product data of only a few items.
Update Expiration Date Attribute
If you are products are getting expiration warnings because of an approaching expiration date that you have set intentionally with the [expiration_date] attribute, you have two options:
- Extend the expiration date: Using the same [expiration_date] attribute, you can submit a later date so that the item stays active a little longer. But remember that the item will expire in 30 days after it was last submitted on the GMC.
- Remove the attribute: Or you can entirely remove the expiration date. Once you do that and resubmit your feed, the item will start following Google’s standard 30-day expiration cycle from the day it is resubmitted.
Using a Feed Management Solution
You can also use data feed solutions that help you automatically resubmit your feed data to the Merchant Center on a regular basis.
One such tool is AdNabu, a feed management software for Shopify merchants. AdNabu helps you easily manage and optimize your Shopify products for Google Shopping and other marketplaces. Using the app and its AI capabilities, you can edit all the essential Google Shopping feed attributes within Shopify and sync their values to Google accurately!
Our app also allows Shopify merchants to easily set expiration dates for products individually or in bulk in the same format that is specified by Google.
That’s not all. The cherry on top is that any edits made to your store data and feeds can be automatically and instantly synced to GMC! This is possible because of features like Instant Shopify sync, which help to keep your product data fresh on Merchant Center. Thus, you can easily evade the ‘Expiring items’ in GMC error if you are using an app like AdNabu.
Let Google Auto-Refresh Data
For merchants using the web crawler method for building their feed, Google may automatically refresh your product data by crawling your website.
Basically, in the web crawler method (a.k.a adding products automatically from your online store), Google automatically adds products (or updates their data) to the Merchant Center by scanning your product pages and extracting information from the structured data on those pages.
But remember, this method doesn’t guarantee regular product updates. This is because, for the web crawler method, the rate at which Google crawls your website and collects product data depends on the traffic that you are getting from Google. So, if you are getting high traffic, your crawl rate will likely be higher.
Moreover, your website’s structured data must be perfect and fully compliant with Merchant Center’s supported schemas. Otherwise, this method may fail to help you refresh the data for expiring items in GMC.
| Note: 1. Contrary to popular belief, supplemental feeds cannot help you reset the expiration date. To refresh your product feed data, you need to submit your entire inventory again. Supplemental feeds will not help as they are useful only for partial updates. 2. Sometimes, scheduled or auto fetches from Google can fail. Therefore, it is important to keep reviewing primary data sources and their last updated dates in GMC. |
Tools to Prevent Product Expirations
We will now look at some tools that can help you deal with the expiring items GMC error.
AdNabu
As we discussed in the previous section, AdNabu is a product feed management app for Shopify merchants. Using the app, Shopify merchants can sync and market their products to leading marketplaces such as:
Also, AdNabu allows you to refresh your Google Merchant Center product data on a regular basis and ensure that your inventory data on Shopify and Google Merchant Center product data are in sync.
This not only helps you prevent your items from expiring on GMC, but also helps you avoid price mismatches and product availability mismatches.
Pricing: The app offers a 14-day free trial.
Additionally, it offers a free plan, a basic plan which starts at $39.99/month, an advanced plan which starts at $99.99/month, and a plus plan which starts at $249.99/month.
If you have specific requirements for your store, you can contact our support team at support@adnabu.com for custom quotes.
Never worry about expired products in GMC again.
AdNabu auto-syncs your
Shopify data regularly and accurately!
DataFeedWatch
Datafeedwatch is another popular feed management tool that helps merchants keep their product data fresh across multiple channels. It is compatible with Shopify, BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, etc.
For the expiring items in GMC error, DataFeedWatch allows merchants to create text-delimited or XML data feeds, which can easily be used to schedule daily fetches. This means that your product data gets refreshed on GMC every 24 hours, and thus your products never expire.
Pricing: They offer a 15-day free trial, and their pricing plans start from $64/month.
GoDataFeed
GoDataFeed, another feed solution, offers functionality similar to the other tools we discussed above. Using it, you can accurately submit your Google feed via different methods, such as ‘feed pull URL.’
You can set up scheduled fetches on the Google Merchant Center to ensure that Google regularly pulls your latest product data from GoDataFeed. This helps keep your listings updated and prevents issues like expiring items.
Pricing: They offer a 14-day free trial, and their pricing plans start from $39/month.
Conclusion
Product expiration in Google Merchant Center is a common but avoidable issue. To avoid it, just ensure that you are regularly refreshing your Merchant Center data with the original product upload method that you have used in the past.
That will help you keep your listings active and your products eligible for all marketing methods on Google.
Good luck.
FAQs
- How can I identify expiring items in Google Merchant Center?
In your Merchant Center account, go to “Products”, then “Needs Attention”. There you will find the list of products that are about to expire.
- How can I extend the expiration date of my products?
You cannot extend the expiration date for any item. By default, all products will expire in 30 days from their last refresh.
- How do I fix the “Product pause expired” error in Google Merchant Center?
This error is noticed when a product has been paused with the [pause] attribute for more than two weeks. To resolve it, remove the pause attribute from the affected item(s) and resubmit your feed using your originally chosen upload method.
- How to fix expiring items in Google Merchant Center?
Resubmit your entire feed on Merchant Center using your original product upload method. That will help refresh your inventory data and prevent items from expiring. In case you are using scheduled fetches, or let’s say a data feed solution, which updates your product data in Merchant Center on a daily or weekly basis, then you don’t need to take any action.
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