Podsync AI Product Feed Auditor for Google Merchant Center

A shopping channel marks a product disapproved and does not really tell you why. The usual advice is to open Merchant Center once a week and work through the diagnostics tab. That means you find out after the disapproval, and a disapproved product sells nothing in the meantime. This plugin runs those checks in your own shop instead, before anything is sent. It does two things, in the order that actually helps. First it tells you what is wrong. Thirty-five checks against what the shopping channels ask for, run over your real products, sorted by whether the problem stops your whole shop, stops one product, or just costs you position. Ten products with no barcode become one line that says so, with links to three of them. Then it builds the feed. For channels that read an address, you get an address to paste in. For channels that ask you to upload the file yourself, you get the file. Products with a blocking problem are left out rather than sent broken, because a feed full of rejects gets the whole shop marked down, including the products that were fine. Barcode check digits A barcode with one digit mistyped is worse than no barcode at all. It looks right on your product screen, it passes an "is this field filled in" test, and the channel silently fails to match it. From the outside nothing appears to be wrong, so there is nothing prompting you to look. This plugin does the arithmetic. A GTIN, UPC, EAN or ISBN carries a check digit calculated from the digits before it, so a mistyped code can be caught before it costs you anything. It also catches the commonest version of the mistake: a thirteen digit code with the last digit dropped, which still looks like a valid twelve digit one. Be clear about what this can and cannot know. The channels separate a code that is invalid, meaning the arithmetic does not come out, from one that is incorrect, meaning the arithmetic is fine but the code belongs to a different product. Arithmetic finds the first. Only the manufacturer's own records can settle the second, so no plugin should claim to. What it checks

• Whether your shop can be listed at all: policy pages, return window, currency, shipping
• Barcodes: missing, wrong length, and check digit arithmetic
• Titles and descriptions: too short, empty, formatted in a way that will not survive
• Images: missing, too few, too small
• Prices: missing, and sale prices entered above the regular price
• Stock: status missing, quantity not tracked where a channel needs the number
• Variations: colour and size missing, variations with no parent
• Products a channel refuses outright, and downloads where only physical goods are accepted

What it will never do

• Change or delete anything in your shop. It reads.
• Send your products, customers or orders to the plugin author.
• Put a feed at a public address for a channel that asks you not to.
• Tell you your shop is fine when it could not run the check.

Built for a real catalogue A shop with twenty thousand products cannot be checked inside one page load, and a screen that dies halfway is worse than a slow one. The check runs in pieces with a progress bar, and each piece hands back well inside what your host allows. The feed is written to a working file and swapped into place only when it is whole, so a channel reading at that moment gets the previous feed or the new one, never half of either. Keeping up without updating The shopping channels change what they ask for. Those requirements live in a signed rule file the plugin fetches once a day, so a change on their side does not wait for a plugin release. Every file is checked against a signature made with a key that is not in this plugin, refused if it is older than the one already in use, and refused if it describes anything the plugin does not already know how to do. If any of that fails, or the server cannot be reached, your shop carries on with the rules it already had.

1. Install and activate the plugin. WooCommerce must be active first.
2. Go to WooCommerce > AI Shopping. The readiness screen runs the checks over your real products straight away, sorted by whether a problem stops your whole shop, stops one product, or just costs you position.
3. Work down the list. Each line says how many products are affected and links to three of them, so you can see the actual problem rather than a count.
4. Go to WooCommerce > AI Shopping settings and fill in the few things WooCommerce does not record but every channel asks for. These are shop-wide, so you set them once.
5. Come back to AI Shopping and open the feed for the channel you sell on. Channels that read an address get an address to paste in; channels that want the file get a download.

Products with a blocking problem are left out of the feed rather than sent broken, because a feed full of rejects gets the whole shop marked down, including the products that were fine.

0.1.4

• Listing only: tags that other shop owners actually browse, and a name that says it works with Google Merchant Center. No change to how the plugin behaves.

0.1.3

• New check: your shop charges tax but shows prices without it. Outside the US and Canada the channels expect the price on the page to include tax, so the feed and the page disagree and the product is rejected for a price mismatch. Nothing about the product looks wrong, which is why this one is hard to find.
• Rules can now ask for several conditions at once. The tax check needs three, and two was the old limit. A rule file still cannot read a setting or use an operator it did not declare, nested or not.
• The rule loader read a version number that had been written down by hand and gone stale, so it could refuse a rule file this plugin was able to run.

0.1.2

• The addresses in the listing are links now. They were plain text, so nothing on wordpress.org pointed here in a way a reader, or a crawler, could follow.

0.1.1

• The listing now says where the paid add-on is. It was not mentioned anywhere, so nobody using this could find it.

0.1.0

• First release.