Fixing “Missing required attribute: price” and invalid price formats

The exact price format Google Shopping accepts, and the currency and decimal mistakes that silently disapprove products.

Check your own feed first. feedcheck scans your whole product file in your browser and lists every row with this problem — plus the other 5 disapproval causes below. Nothing is uploaded.
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What Google is actually complaining about

price must be a number, a single space, then a 3-letter ISO currency code: 24.99 USD. Google is strict about the shape, and these all fail:

ValueWhy it fails
$24.99Currency symbol instead of an ISO code
24,99 EURComma decimal separator — must be a dot
1,299.00 USDThousands separator not allowed
24.99No currency code (only valid if set feed-wide)
0.00 USDZero price is rejected
24.99 USNot a valid ISO 4217 code

The other half of this error is a price mismatch: the feed says one number and your landing page shows another. Google crawls the page and disapproves on any disagreement — including when the page shows a tax-inclusive price and the feed doesn't.

How to fix it

  1. Normalise to NNN.NN CUR — dot decimal, no thousands separator, uppercase ISO currency.
  2. Make the currency match the country in your feed settings. A GBP price on a feed targeting the US will disapprove.
  3. If an item is on sale, keep price as the regular price and put the discount in sale_price. Don't overwrite price.
  4. Confirm the landing page shows the same number in the same currency, including tax treatment.
  5. Drop any item priced 0.00 or re-price it.

What a correct row looks like

id,title,price,sale_price,availability,link
SKU-4471,Cast Iron Skillet 10in,49.99 USD,39.99 USD,in_stock,https://example.com/p/4471
SKU-4472,Hand-thrown Mug,24.00 USD,,in_stock,https://example.com/p/4472

How long until the disapproval clears

Merchant Center re-crawls a scheduled feed on its normal cadence, so a fix can sit invisible for up to 24 hours. To force it: Products → Feeds → your feed → Fetch now, then re-check Diagnostics the following day. Items usually flip back to Active within one or two crawls once the attribute validates.

Don't want to edit thousands of rows by hand?

FeedCheck Rescue — $29, one-off. Send your feed file and I run the auto-fixer over it, then send back a corrected file plus a plain-English changelog of every single edit, so you can see exactly what changed before you upload it.

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Other common disapproval causes

Invalid GTINDuplicate product IDsImage link errorsAvailability mismatchMissing required attributes