If you've searched "GTIN disapproved" or "missing GTIN Google Merchant Center," you're not alone — it's one of the most common complaints on the Shopify Community forums. Products get flagged even when nothing's actually wrong with the listing.

What's actually going on

Google Shopping wants every product to have a unique identifier: a GTIN (barcode), an MPN (manufacturer part number), or a brand — any one of these three counts on its own. If a product genuinely has none of them (a handmade or custom item, for example), the feed needs a field called identifier_exists set to false to tell Google "yes, this one really doesn't have one, don't penalize it."

Problems start when a feed gets this field wrong in either direction:

  • Set to true when it shouldn't be — Google expects a GTIN/MPN it'll never get, and the product gets disapproved or demoted.
  • Set to false when the product actually has a brand — the product gets treated as unidentifiable even though it doesn't need to be.

A common mistake in home-built feeds is checking a product's SKU as if it counts toward this. It doesn't — Google is explicit that internal SKUs are store-specific codes, not manufacturer identifiers, and don't satisfy this requirement at all.

How Unlimited Feed handles it

Every feed generated by Unlimited Feed checks GTIN, MPN and brand for each product, and sets identifier_exists correctly based on whether any one of the three is present — no SKU involved. If your products have a Vendor set in Shopify (which most do), that alone is enough to satisfy Google's requirement, even without a GTIN.

One more common request: a feed for just one collection

The other recurring question on the forums is people wanting a feed of one specific collection, not their whole catalog — usually because they're running a campaign for one product line and don't want to submit their entire store. Unlimited Feed supports this directly: generate a feed for your whole catalog, or a separate one per collection, each with its own feed URL.