A less obvious Merchant Center problem, especially if you resell or dropship: how you fill in brand and MPN. Get these wrong and products get disapproved quietly, without a dramatic suspension, so you lose impressions without an obvious cause.
Two things Google reads as a feed that does not describe the real product:
- Brand = your store name on products you did not make. If "Luna Goods" resells an item made by "Acme," the brand field should say Acme, not Luna Goods. A brand that just repeats the store name on resold goods looks like misrepresentation.
- MPN that is really your internal SKU. The manufacturer part number is the maker's identifier. Dressing up your own SKU as an MPN is a common auto-generated-feed mistake.
If you make your own products, brand = your name is correct and you may not have an MPN at all, which is fine. This mostly bites resellers whose feed app fills brand and MPN from store fields by default. Do you sell your own products or resell, and how are you populating brand in the feed?
Reseller. Default feed mapping put my store name as the brand on everything.
Nothing got suspended. Products just stopped showing. Worse, honestly, no alert.
Fixed brand to the real manufacturer per product. Tedious. Impressions came back in a couple weeks.
MPN I leave blank instead of faking. Google's fine with it.