price

Price is the field channels validate against your landing page on every crawl, and a mismatch — even by a single penny — blocks delivery. The verification happens at fetch time and again at periodic landing-page recrawls; either path can flag an inconsistency. For sites where prices change frequently (dynamic pricing, regional pricing, promotional cycling), staying ahead of these checks requires more than scheduled feed refreshes — it requires real-time updates via the Catalog Batch API or equivalent.

The format rules are unforgiving. "29.99 GBP" — single space, ISO 4217 code uppercase, period decimal even in EU locales, no currency symbols. Common mistakes that look innocuous: "£29.99" (symbol instead of code), "29,99 EUR" (comma decimal), "29.99" (missing currency). Each of these gets rejected. The cause is almost always a feed-generation pipeline that doesn't enforce format; the fix is normalising at the pipeline rather than spot-fixing items.

VAT treatment is the consistency rule most cross-border catalogs miss. UK and EU markets require VAT-inclusive pricing in price — the customer sees the final price, and the feed should match. US and Canada typically use VAT-exclusive pricing with tax calculated at checkout. Mixing the two — VAT-exclusive feed price with VAT-inclusive landing page, or vice versa — triggers Mismatched value [price] flags universally. For multi-region catalogs, separate region-specific feeds with appropriate VAT treatment per region is cleaner than one mixed feed.

The strategic context: price also drives competitive-set placement. Google ranks Shopping listings against other listings of similar-priced products, so misrepresenting price (showing an artificially low feed price that mismatches the landing page) puts your listing in a competitive set where you can't actually compete on price when users land. It's a short-term gain at the cost of medium-term suppression as the auction recalibrates and your listing is demoted for delivering worse-than-promised value at checkout.

The schema.org markup angle catches sites that look fine to users but fail crawler validation. Google reads schema.org/Product markup on the landing page when checking price; if the schema price is different from the visible HTML price, Google trusts the schema. So a landing page that visually shows "£29.99" but has stale "£24.99" in its schema markup gets flagged as mismatched against a feed that correctly shows £29.99. Audit schema markup as part of price diagnosis, not just visible page content.

Currency conversions in dynamic-pricing systems are another quiet source of mismatches. The base price in your product database might be USD; the landing page converts to GBP at the current exchange rate; the feed exports at a slightly older rate. Even a 1-2% conversion rate drift produces price mismatches that trigger flagging. The fix is to lock conversion rates per feed-refresh cycle so the landing page and the feed use the same rate at the same time.

For pricing strategy beyond just feed validity, the listed price drives placement quality more than most teams realise. Items priced below the competitive-set median win on price-sensitive searches but lose on perceived-quality searches; items priced above the median win on quality positioning but lose volume. The optimal price in the feed isn't necessarily the lowest price — it's the price where total revenue (price × probability-of-purchase × conversion-rate-given-click) is maximised. Most catalogs leave significant margin on the table by under-pricing items where higher prices would actually convert at similar or better rates.