Who makes this, and why

Where it came from

Every Shopping account has a feed behind it, and most feeds have quiet faults: a comma where Google wants a point, a barcode that fails its check digit, an image that no longer answers, a robots rule that blocks the one crawler that matters for ads. None of it is visible in a spreadsheet, and all of it costs impressions. The work of finding those faults was the same each time, so it became a list, and the list became this.

The principles it is built on

• Fix what a file can prove, and say so about the rest. A file cannot see your live pages, your account status, or your history. Rather than blur that line, we draw it clearly, because being straight about the boundary is what makes the rest worth trusting.
• Never invent a value. Where text is rewritten, every word is checked against your own row, and anything your data does not support is discarded. A tool that confidently makes things up is worse than no tool.
• Correct without overwriting. The fix is an overlay Google reads alongside your feed, not an edit to the feed, so your nightly export cannot wipe it and there is no subscription keeping it alive. That is the method.
• Count honestly. The number of checks on this site is read from the code, not typed, and a check does not count until it can be shown to fire on a real file. The reasoning is on how we know.

Who it is for

Anyone running products through Google Shopping who would rather see the whole list of what is wrong in one pass than discover it one disapproval at a time. It is particularly for the messier end: an export that barely resembles a feed still gets read, because the column mapping works out what your headers mean rather than requiring you to have a clean file already.

Independence

FeedMender is not part of Google and nothing here is endorsed by them. It reads Google's published product data requirements and helps you meet the part a file can be held to. Where a rule is Google's, we cite Google; where a judgement is ours, we say it is ours.

The clearest introduction is a scan of your own feed. It is free and shows every finding before anything is asked of you. For anything else, hello@feedmender.com.