Invalid or missing required attribute: id

What Google requires

One stable, unique id per product, under 50 characters

Every product needs an id, unique within the feed, at most 50 characters, without control characters. Stability matters as much as validity: the id is how Google recognises a product across syncs, so an id that changes is a new product with no history, and the old one expires.

What happens if you do not

Silent merging, or history lost wholesale

A duplicate id makes two products fight over one slot: the later row overwrites the earlier and only your shop knows which was the real product. A missing id drops the row at the door. The expensive mistake is regenerating ids on every export, some plugins do, which resets every product's history and disconnects any supplemental data source that was matching on the old ids.

How to fix it by hand

Use the SKU, and never change it

• Use a stable internal identifier, typically the SKU, as the id, and configure the export to never regenerate it.
• Deduplicate: where two rows share an id legitimately, they are variants and belong under an item_group_id with distinct ids per variant.
• Keep ids ASCII-safe and under 50 characters; invisible control characters from copy-paste count against the limit and against validity.

Which of our checks apply

4 checks apply, read from the scanner's registry

Duplicate detection reports which rows collide so your shop can decide which is real; the scan never guesses between them. This matters doubly here because the supplemental fix itself joins on id.

• id_missingblocks
• id_duplicateblocks
• id_too_longblocks
• id_invalid_unicodeblocks

The quicker way

Let the scan find them

The scan verifies every id in the file, and since the whole repair mechanism joins on this attribute, it is the first thing worth getting right. The scan to identify errors is free and shows every finding before you pay anything. You only pay for the fix.

Scan your feed