Invalid value: color [color]

What Google requires

Words, not codes, up to three joined by a slash

Color is free text but it has to name a colour: up to 100 characters overall, at most three values, and when there is more than one they are joined with a slash, as in Red/Blue/Green. Each value is a word a shopper would recognise, not a number, not a single letter, not a paint code. The first value is treated as the primary colour. (UK and IE accounts see the same issue as Invalid value: colour [color].)

What Google does

The value is refused, and variants stop grouping

Digits in the field, a lone letter such as R, or a value past the length limit are rejected outright. Values concatenated without a slash, RedBlue, read as one nonsense colour, which breaks the colour facet shoppers filter on and stops variants grouping under one item group. For apparel the attribute is required, so a bad colour is a disapproval, not a cosmetic problem.

How to fix it by hand

Normalise to colour words

• Replace codes with the colour word: BLK becomes Black, R becomes Red.
• Join multiple colours with a slash, most important first, three at most.
• Move size, material and pattern out of the colour field into their own attributes.
• Keep the whole value under 100 characters and each colour under 40.

What FeedMender checks today

6 checks apply, read from the scanner's registry

The scan separates a genuinely broken colour from one that only needs a separator, and flags the concatenations that read as one word but are really several.

• color_contains_digitsblocks
• color_single_letterblocks
• color_too_longblocks
• color_value_too_longblocks
• color_possibly_concatenatedat risk
• color_separatorat risk

What the scan does not check today: whether the colour is the true colour of the product; it reads the value's shape, not the item.

The quicker way

Let the scan normalise them

Run the free scan and it lists the colours carrying digits, single letters or missing separators, per product. The scan to identify errors is free and shows every finding before you pay anything. You only pay for the fix.

Scan your feed