A Black Friday sale changes prices across your catalog in a few hours, and your Google Shopping listings have to change with them. Products that are disapproved or show the wrong price during the sale cannot be fixed after it. This guide covers what to clean up beforehand, how sale prices work in Google Merchant Center, and what to check while the sale runs.
Fix existing problems first
Start with the products Google is already rejecting. Open the product issues in Merchant Center and work through them well ahead of the sale, since fixes need time to be reprocessed.
- Disapprovals: See fixing disapproved products
- Not showing at all: See products not showing in Google Shopping
- Identifiers: See GTIN, MPN and brand
- Shipping: See missing shipping in Merchant Center
How sale prices work in Merchant Center
Google's product data specification has a sale price attribute for discounted products. Google's help page says to keep submitting the full, non-sale price in the price attribute, and to submit the lower price in the sale price attribute. The sale price should be less than the price.
- Landing page: Google asks you to clearly display both the non-sale and sale prices
- Checkout: Only the sale price should be shown
- Original price display: Google says the original price may show along with the sale price if certain requirements are met, and that the annotation may not always appear
In Shopify, a sale is set by putting the original price in the compare-at price field and the lower price in the price field. Check how your Google sales channel or feed app maps those two fields.
Schedule the sale dates
The sale price effective date attribute tells Google the date range a sale price applies to. Google states that without it, the sale price is used immediately. That matters if you load sale prices into your feed before the sale starts.
| Detail | What Google's help page says |
|---|---|
| Format | A start and end date in ISO 8601 format, separated by a slash |
| Time zone | If you leave it out, Google defaults to UTC |
| No time given | The sale starts at midnight on the start date |
Include the time zone, or your sale may start hours early or late in Google's listings.
Keep the feed and the store in agreement
A price in your feed that differs from the price on your product page can get a product disapproved. Make sure the two change together when the sale starts and again when it ends.
- ✅ Test one product: change the price and confirm the feed picks it up
- ✅ Check the price shown on the landing page matches the feed for every variant
- ✅ Plan the end of the sale as carefully as the start
- ❌ Do not advertise a discount code price as the sale price unless every shopper gets it through checkout
If mismatches appear, see fixing price mismatch in Merchant Center.
Leave titles and images alone during the sale
Large edits just before the sale can trigger new issues at the worst moment. Finish title improvements early, and keep promotional text and badges off your main product images, as covered in text on image disapprovals.
Doing this at scale
FeedFix checks every product against Google Merchant Center and Meta Catalog rules and scores each one from 0 to 100 per channel. It drafts compliant title and description rewrites that you review as before and after diffs, then apply in bulk, with every change audit-logged. See FeedFix.