Motorcycle gear retailer
Taking Merchant Center From 46.8% to 99.5% Eligible in a Day
Why a Shopify store's Merchant Center dashboard showed half the catalogue ineligible, what was actually broken, and how a supplemental feed fixed it without touching the website.
Merchant Center showing products as limited or disapproved? Get a free feed check.The problem
A motorcycle gear retailer on Shopify, running Google Shopping and local inventory ads, saw Merchant Center report 46.8% of products eligible. It read as half the catalogue being broken.
What we found
It was not. Nearly half the report rows were local-inventory copies of the same products, all waiting on Google's first local inventory review. They halved the percentage without a single product being wrong. Split by channel, online eligibility was already 93.1%.
The real damage was 27 hard disapprovals for non-product data, every one caused by a promotional SEO title such as “Buy … | Best Price in India”. Shopify's Google channel sends the SEO title, not the product title, as the Merchant Center title. 41 more products carried the same phrasing and had not been flagged yet.
What we changed
Fixing the SEO titles in Shopify would also have rewritten the store's Google Search snippets, which the owner had not asked for. So the fix went into a supplemental data source linked ahead of the Shopify feed. It overrides the title, Google product category and product type for 430+ offers, and Shopify still supplies everything else.
Later, on the website side: the theme moved to Horizon 4.2 with no edits to core files so future updates install cleanly, and a catalogue SEO pass gave every active product a clean SEO title and product type.
The result
Online eligibility went from 93.1% to 99.5% and disapprovals from 30 to 1, the same day. The local inventory rows were left to finish their review rather than switched off, because the local setup behind them was real.
Every feed fails in its own way, so the fix above is the shape of the work rather than a recipe. We check yours before quoting.
The store is described rather than named. Every figure on this page is one we measured on it.